


Eclipse and Transit

by montparnasse



Series: Eclipse and Transit [1]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Canonical Character Death, First War with Voldemort, Infidelity, M/M, Post-Break Up
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-15
Updated: 2017-08-15
Packaged: 2018-12-15 22:17:04
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 34,252
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11815290
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/montparnasse/pseuds/montparnasse
Summary: In the August heatwave of 1981 Sirius receives a letter from his dead brother and an unwelcome visitor at his door, sending him far across the country with Remus for a delayed burial. Along the way they thoroughly fail to extricate themselves from each other’s lives.





	Eclipse and Transit

**Author's Note:**

> The timeline here re: Regulus’s death is a bit off—the wiki lists it as 1979, though the only source given for that is [this family tree](http://harrypotter.wikia.com/wiki/File:800px-Black_Family_Tree.png) (weirdly the tapestry from the films doesn’t seem to show his birth or death dates), which also makes a couple of non-canon assumptions, so! There’s also an instance of what could possibly be considered “dubious consent” in this story—everything is 100% consensual and they’re both totally into it, but nothing is ever discussed between them. Read with care if you need, but if you’d rather skip it altogether, stop reading when Sirius hears the key in the lock and pick the scene back up when Sirius asks, “How long?” If you have any questions/concerns etc, I’m [here](http://montpahrnah.tumblr.com/) on tumblr <3
> 
> Believe it or not this was a labor of love.

The owl came just before Sirius’s two a.m. bedtime—he was working nights as a consultant for the Department of Magical-Muggle Relations, which usually necessitated a mind-numbing amount of patrolling the Tube stations and the tunnels beneath the city for boggarts and doxies and the not-infrequent overgrowth of devil’s snare peering through the concrete cracks with the bad graffiti—and jolted him out of his stoned unsleeping at the end of the bed like a live wire, pecking the windowpane in irritation until he got up and took the letter from its long talon before it swooped around the room and knocked over a precarious stack of books on the desk in vengeance before it left. In the other room he could hear Remus sighing in rictus dreams on the couch from which he’d hardly moved since he showed up the day before with his trunk and a backpack claiming he’d forgotten something but obviously having nowhere else to go; whether Dearborn had thrown him out or he’d left of his own volition wasn’t clear and Sirius didn’t really care. They were not on speaking terms but Remus’s name was on the lease too, so Sirius lent him the couch and hid his pot in the cupboard above the refrigerator where Remus wouldn’t think to look. When he caught his reflection in the midnight window as he watched the owl fly off he thought he looked older, or maybe just sadder, like something in his face had changed without realizing it, his eyes a strange somnambulist grey.

There was no return address on the envelope except a crooked _Wasdale_ but he knew who it was from before he even saw the loping script, his hand hovering over it like it was blood or venom; Regulus’s obituary had been in the _Prophet_ two days earlier though from what Sirius understood vis-à-vis scraps of gossip overheard while loitering outside Dumbledore’s office the day before they’d only found a piece of him, washed up on the moss-edged banks of the Leven in Lancashire. For hours after he read the obituary— _Survived by his mother, Walburga, and his cousin Narcissa_ —he sat in the bathroom and tried to cry for hours but it wouldn’t come, and he wondered while he sat in the bathtub with a bottle of Ogden’s Old if this meant he’d finally been scorched hollow, if he’d spent every last cent of his love and his patience and his kindness and bled himself of any improbable chance at happiness or a future until at last there was nothing left to do but die, which at this juncture in the war was the only certainty, the blessed unlight beckoning at the end of a constantly narrowing tunnel. 

He was just thinking he wasn’t as worried about it as maybe he ought to be when Remus turned up the next afternoon and he laid in bed all night and morning feeling his heart overflowing with an electric theremin-thrum through his whole body like tinnitus, nauseous with anger and betrayal and hurt and a yearning so unambiguous it resembled appetite, wanting to break something apart with his teeth or set the flat on fire so ravenously that he realized he’d jumped the gun on the emotional bloodletting such that he accidentally broke the coffee carafe the next morning with a voltaic discharge of magic he couldn’t contain. Again he felt his hands shaking as he opened the envelope and unfolded the letter, trying to keep the current of it focused in his fingers like a numbing static shock as he read:

> _Sirius:_
> 
> _It’s doubtful I still live by the time you’ve gotten this but you likely already know that much. There are things I can’t explain and most of them I am not sure are truly possible and yet they must be. I can’t see where it begins or ends—the whole thing is like a snake eating its own tail. At this point I’m not sure how I’m still alive but I’ve begun to suspect this was all orchestrated long before we were ever born but to what hellish end I can’t say. I don’t know where I am going but you must find it. If you do nothing else you must find this place. He doesn’t eat and he never sleeps. If you don’t find it he will never die._
> 
> _After all this time it’s weird to say anything to you at all; some days I have trouble remembering what you sound like and when I think of you you are always so much younger, before school and before childish betrayals, certainly before the bigger ones. I spent so long looking after the life you ran away from that sometimes I’m not sure who I was supposed to be or who I even am and now I suppose it’s too late for resentment but the dead and/or dying are allowed a certain lassitude in our acrimony; forgive me. The concept is more important than the context. I have missed you. I have also hated you. And no matter what it all comes to dust in the end._
> 
> _Goodbye. Someday I hope you get everything you deserve._
> 
> _RAB_

Parts of it were barely legible and he wondered if Regulus had been high on something or was possibly experiencing some kind of torturous Faustian soul-rending when he wrote it, but Dumbledore divined something in the spiderwebbed ink-blotch entrails that sent Sirius north on the motorbike to see what was left of his brother’s doomsday augury to be found in the toothy hills of Cumbria, which he supposed was as good a place as any to die: he did not truly expect to survive the trip, especially not after Dumbledore insisted Remus accompany him in what seemed to be his initiation into the secret tenth circle of hell. Sirius had argued with the old man about it, first via Floo and then uninvited in his office, interrupting his midafternoon tea time with Elphias Doge, but then Dumbledore mentioned James and Lily and the baby, and has everything Sirius not evaporated from your life piece by piece until all your hope and all your love and the lump sum of your entire fucking sadsack self hang distilled on this slim and desiccated thread, your only, your one last thing, your wafer and your wine, the altar upon which you have made yourself a living sacrifice? So he went home with that kicked look Remus had always hated and shoved some clothes in his backpack, thinking for the nth time that the old man would’ve made a genius doomed mystic and/or cult leader himself, knowing just how to get him to drop his feelings and his future and run exultant for the plume of a hundred-year comet’s tail.

Just after dawn he woke Remus and went outside to wait with a thermos of coffee and a day-old rugelach from the bakery down the road, watching the milk-blue rime of dawn creep up the hill and into the windows of the pub and the florist and the grey morning windows in the rows of flats glinting like eyes, a dearly wasted couple across the road trying to fit a revolting orange couch from the roadside into the back of their friend’s station wagon. Already a sulky haze clouded the distance, the humidity thickening into cottony strands in his lungs and at his fingertips and even though he was trying very hard not to he remembered the morning they moved in, up the stairs and around the corner, rainy blue late June ‘78 with the smell of honeysuckle creeping over the trellis in the courtyard below the kitchen window and their summer sweat as they arranged the furniture without magic and put new sheets on the bed, living out of boxes for a few days until the sediment settled into place and the’d filled whole flat with themselves from corner to corner. 

Those first few nights they slept in a nest of sheets spelled cool on the living room floor because they couldn’t find a charm for the squeaky ceiling fan in the bedroom, staying up very late listening to the drunks in the street and their records and the broken nighttime music of Camden filtering through their windows like a slant of light while they made love on the floor in the dark, sometimes two or three times in a row, lying in the sheets after with their legs tangled and his head pressed to Remus’s chest listening to the miraculous machinery of his body keeping time until the sun tore through the toothy grey skyline like a yolk. For hours he ran his hands over the jumbled landscape of their skin, dipping into faultlines and rivers of veins that hummed and rose in red heartbeat-currents to the touch of words and mouths and fingers, beating please-please-please-please into Sirius’s open mouth as if he’d spoken it himself. He was eighteen and even then in some distant, malignant part of him he had known that it was the happiest he would ever be.

Late that winter—a hallucinatory few days at the end of February, balmy-bright and unseasonably warm—he’d thought he should try falling in love again, that maybe the cure was more of it: plant something new so the roots choke out the old wilted undergrowth. Then in the first frost-fall of March, three months after Marlene was murdered during a botched job infiltrating a blood purist club in Cambridge (Peter had escaped with a singed eyebrow and bruised shins by sole virtue, Sirius supposed, of the sheer dumb luck that seemed to sustain him), Dorcas charged laughing into an enclave of Death Eaters in the Bowland Fells and killed four of them before Voldemort made an appearance and killed her too, very slowly, breath by breath. And after everything—after every fucking thing—he understood it. He understood the compulsion and the final lethal act, knew even then that he would do the same; when they whispered about her insanity and how she’d not been right for months and did you know about her and McKinnon and how stupid, how very very deeply stupid idiotic fucked-up near-traitorous it was, he thought it was probably the sanest thing he’d seen anyone do for a year at least. Dying on the knife of your own love, he thought, wouldn’t be so bad, not even if it was unwanted. Wild tearing screaming hurting feral choking dripping-wet dying fucking love. He would never be rid of it.

When he heard footsteps on the concrete he shouldered his backpack again and looked toward the door to their building to see Remus stubbing out his cigarette on the curb, not looking at Sirius and pointedly not touching him as he slid into place on the motorbike; he’d lost some weight and hadn’t bothered to comb his hair but Sirius matched him on both counts. Unless they were talking to themselves or slamming their heads into things there was no point worrying about the overstuffed Molotov cocktail of their collective mental health though he suspected it would all blow like an atomic aneurysm someday if they lived through this. They’d all stopped making plans past tomorrow and rarely wore anything but mourning black. Suck it up, he told himself, just as Remus put his hands firmly but very nervously on Sirius’s waist just below his backpack, suck it up. Chew and swallow. Push it down. Grind it to dust. Forget it.

“I’m sorry about your brother,” Remus said to the back of his neck. It was the first real thing he’d said to Sirius since October that wasn’t a terse relay of information from another member of the Order or the thin, sickly lie on Sirius’s doorstep a couple of nights ago, like a vampire in the hilarious Muggle stories trying to trick him into letting him inside; of late he’d had trouble meeting Sirius’s eyes though it had not at first been an issue for him. 

He wanted to say something—like, the only thing you’ve ever been sorry for in your entire goddamn brittle one-track life is yourself. Instead he turned the key in the ignition and let the pulsebeat-rattle of the motorbike drown out the sound of his heartbeat shaking like a last winter leaf in his teeth and in his ears and down every rung of his ribs under Remus’s quiet hands, shaking, shaking.

—

Days of dust, days of smoke and death and fever. The heat that summer was surreal even in the Lake District with the strange whining wind blowing across Wastwater, an uneasy yellow cast clinging to the sky and the air like a bad omen; it was killing-weather, divorce-weather, arson-weather. In the garden below the flat in Kentish Town oleander grew, transplanted decades ago from the Americas and thriving when everything else had been shriveled to ashen straw. At home after work he looked down at the deadly blooms from the kitchen window late at night, trying to catch the scent while he watched the singed moon rise over the rooftops and the bowed tree branches lining the climb uphill on the street, drinking iced Earl Grey or whiskey with bowls of ice water underneath the ceiling fans while a siren moaned somewhere across the city; during the flash-point weather they used to set out the tarot deck on the kitchen table and read each other’s cards or trace cold fingertips very sensually into the rune-lines of their palms but it was no fun doing it by yourself. And he didn’t want to know the future anymore.

They’d spent the night listening to the radio in separate beds and staring fixedly at different water-stained sections of the ceiling in a wizarding inn off the M6 near Stafford and left unspeaking the next morning, squinting into the glowering midmorning heat until they stopped to eat lunch in the shade near the lake just as an owl dropped a letter from Lily into Sirius’s lap, saying she felt trapped, saying she felt chained to James and the baby, saying she couldn’t even go to the grocery store without running it by five people first and waiting on Dedalus Diggle to escort her like a hostage, saying her brain was a soft-boiled egg, saying she hated the house, saying she was walking the archetypes. It was the sort of thing she’d normally have said to another woman, one of her friends, but Lily had few friends left alive and she could barely stand to talk to those who had positioned themselves outside the realm of the war’s reach either by dint of getting on with their lives or knowing there was little at stake for them personally no matter what happened. Many were sympathetic and many were terrified but many also tacitly approved of at least some of Voldemort’s aims, if not all. Often when Sirius ran into one of their former classmates on Diagon Alley he got the dismal and jaggedly hysterical feeling that they feared him as much as they would a Death Eater; after they’d begun hunting the McKinnons and the Boneses like game he found he no longer had much patience for most of them. Without telling Remus anything he folded up the letter, and against his skin the scorched murmur of the wind made him feel very close to the edge of something.

Little had given him pause on the drive up but at the bony drought-pale rocks on the lakeshore he couldn’t shake the feeling that something was watching them and cast _revelio_ several times to no avail whatsoever, watching idly at the artful arrangement of twigs and feathers on the ground undisturbed by the spell and trying to make nothing of it; likely Remus had already read them for signs. Still it wouldn’t leave him, a cloying preoccupation like an itch in the skull or the jolting spinal shiver he always got when he was around very old magic: the cellar of Grimmauld Place, the ruins at Tintagel and the sigil-scars at Corfe, certain forbidden corridors of Hogwarts after dark, and—inexplicably—Remus. Beyond the yew trees lining the foot of the fells a flock of crows took flight, heading down the green sinews of the afternoon valley into the gathering clouds, calling to each other like they’d just found fresh carrion to pick clean over the mountains, or else they were fleeing something. Abruptly the wind had died, the water set like glass. It gave the impression of being caught in the crosshairs of something, and when he closed his eyes the brutal cut of the mountains left a burnt-out shape behind his eyelids like a mouth; when he opened them it seemed to move closer.

Remus was sitting with an open book and his sunglasses crooked on one of the narrow sedge-laced promontories jutting into the water where Sirius had been pretending he wasn’t watching him for the last half hour, though Remus had hardly seemed to notice, and Sirius hadn’t seen him look up or turn the page even once. He was pale and looked like he’d been sick recently or maybe still was, his cheeks flushed slightly and his eyes an unslept, swollen red with sunken circles underneath, strange pockmarked bruises on his arms where the veins branched delicately under the thin skin like unfurling tree roots; back in June Peter had suggested over rounds of Talisker at James and Lily’s that Remus was on heroin, which—Sirius remembered, slipping on a wave of livid nausea—Greyback was known to deal in occasionally. Overcome with the urge to punch Peter through the wall and/or vomit on the kitchen floor (it was not the first time and it wasn’t the last) he’d gone outside for a cigarette, burned a clean hole through the sleeve of Peter’s new jacket on the porch swing, and wondered for the ten thousandth time since October 1980 if it was possible to project oneself into another dimension via dream scrying or complex oneiromancy and in the two months since he had in fact done some halfhearted research into the subject. Looking at Remus now he wondered if Peter wasn’t right just like Peter was right when he whispered that Sirius was going mad the way he often did just before Sirius came into the room, conversation turning to vinegar as soon as he caught their eyes.

“I’m going to take a walk,” he said. Remus looked up at him, his eyes catching deep mossy green on the high slant of sunlight. Then he looked away.

“I’ll stay here. Finish this.” He gestured to the book in his lap.

Under the sky Sirius could feel the air thickening on the anvil of something he couldn’t place, the water glinting in a way that made him think of machinated steel. He realized he could no longer even hear birdsong. “No,” he said, knowing he sounded tense and suspicious and vaguely angry i.e. extremely paranoid, “I think you need to come with me.”

“I’ve been trying to finish that for two weeks,” said Remus, somewhat uncertainly, trailing a few feet behind him as Sirius led them away from the shoreline and towards Wasdale Head. “It’s been a long time since I managed to make it through anything.”

“Well you can’t always get what you want, et cetera.”

“That’s practically my theme song,” said Remus. Either he didn’t feel the stab of it or he was completely oblivious, or maybe he just didn’t care. The latter seemed most likely. “Maybe ‘Dead Souls’ too.”

“I was gonna say ‘Breaking Glass.’”

At that Remus shut up for a few minutes while Sirius took his pack cigarettes out of his jeans and lit one, pulling in a drag with grim satisfaction. “Works for you too.”

“‘Brand-New-Life’ is a good kick in the ass.”

“I’ve been listening to _Colossal Youth_ a lot lately. It just seems very apropos of everything I guess. Who was your letter from?”

“Lily.”

“How is she?”

Several weeks ago James had told Sirius while rolling a joint on Sirius’s copy of _Sleep It Off, Lady_ that they had stopped asking Remus around entirely, and Remus seemed to have stopped asking after them; this had come on the heels of a panicked night-flight from their cottage at the Norfolk coast into their current house in Upper Flagley, which was plastered with horrific wallpaper and had spotty electricity. He wasn’t sure Remus even knew where they were staying. “She feels trapped in the house and like her brain’s been scrambled and she hates it. Both of them hate it, and right now they can’t even take the baby outside half the time, it’s all shit.” Last time he’d seen James they had been fighting again and Lily had smashed the telephone she’d been trying futilely to install to pieces on the gravel lane that ran along the side of the house. “You can read it if you want,” he said, trying not to think about the wild tearing hurt he knew had set into Remus’s face, the sad cast of his eyes and his mouth like something set in stone long ago, scarred over, worn smooth as an epitaph. How many pieces of one another had they all shaped, sculpted from the old wounds and the voltaic joys, made of deafening love, made of shame and fear and courage and cowardice? Without each other they wouldn’t even exist, for better or for worse. “Write her something and we can send it when we check in tonight.”

“Have you ever felt like that?” Remus asked after a minute. “Scrambled brains and all, I mean.”

“That’s all I’ve felt like for at least a year. Less scrambled and more like, marshmallow fluff leaking out the ears sometimes. You?”

“A little like being constantly put through a meat grinder or a blender. Feet first. By next year it’ll probably all be soup.”

“Ye of little faith,” said Sirius, “I’d put twenty galleons at least on Christmas for both of us.”

Remus laughed, sort of. “Where are we staying tonight?”

“I hadn’t really thought that far ahead yet. If all else fails I, um, I’ve still got the camping stuff in my backpack, so there’s that.”

Remus laughed, or at least it sounded like a laugh, hoarse and soft, leafy-dry. “If we’re going on some kind of, I don’t know, apocalyptic death trip I guess it’s fitting to spend at least part of it making ourselves even more miserable than we need to be.”

“Your dad told me once that poison ivy and mosquitoes are just part of the experience and like, if you can’t handle it you might as well give up. I always thought it was a metaphor for life or something.”

“My dad was just an asshole,” said Remus. Sirius had slowed slightly and could see his old black boots just out of the corner of his eye, out of step with his own. “I wouldn’t mind. Camping, I mean. I haven’t even been since—"

He never finished but he didn’t need to. Down the valley the mountains and the chalky screes unrolled as far as Sirius could see, windclouds forming at their blunted peaks in dreamy wisps that caught opalescent on the relentless sun in the big bowl of the sky where everything was so still it looked preserved like amber or a moth in a shadowbox, the humidity such that it was almost like moving underwater, muffled and honey-slow, a clean sweat already clinging to his black t-shirt. In his memory he had never been to Wastwater but when he was young his parents had had a friend or a distant dreg of the cracked-up family who owned a summer home on Windermere where they vacationed a few times before Sirius had gone off to Hogwarts, going boating in the afternoons and eating salmon roe on thin wedges of rye or lobster thermidor as prepared by the resident house elf for dinner while his mother drank cabernet all day until at night she switched with the predictability of a weighty pendulum to vodka tonics; mostly he remembered swimming, the cold womb of the water cradling him as he tried in vain to reach one of the small islands at the center of the lake which glittered like ultramarine jewels in the dusklight, his father’s voice on the shore barking some bruising, indecipherable command summoned from his bottomless and often directionless anger until he turned sluggishly back for the docks. Regulus always fussed until finally one year his mother relented and performed a bubble-head charm on him so Sirius could try to teach him in the pebble-shallow waters near the shore, but Regulus had never really liked the water. He watched Sirius swim out and cried and cried, and could never be comforted.

Years ago he and Remus had talked about traveling in the first few months after they had moved into the flat together when everything seemed like it would last forever if he just held on tight enough; indeed he’d held on so tight that he hadn’t noticed the hairline fractures until he had splinters in his fingers, but back then nothing else had mattered except the pitch of their laughter and the smallest space that could contain their breathing bodies, everything they could hope for, everything they could make. First they decided they’d take the motorbike through the West Country and stop at all the best and deadliest ruins and camp by the seashore so Remus could show him all the Cornish stars, strategically located on secret beaches where they could swim naked in the loud midnight tide until they wandered back onto land like something newborn, the same two-headed creature, monstrous and inviolable. Next they’d head north from the Cotswolds to the Yorkshire Dales and the Pennines and the seaside castles and the lighthouses strung along the coast, all the way to the the stone circles and Cladh Hallan in the Hebrides; along the routes they’d plotted idiotically in permanent marker and with magic on Remus’s old wizarding atlas they’d talked about hiking up the crags at Wastwater and camping at the local tarns. Listening to Remus’s footsteps like an echo just behind him as they watched the velvet-dark escarpments of Great Gable come into view he supposed he’d gotten some bitter, scavenged half-life scrap of his wish after all.

Strange, to think of his brother here. Most of the time it was strange to think of his brother at all as by now Sirius could scarcely even recall what he’d looked like around the time they’d all graduated, not quite seventeen years old and likely already with the tattoo decorating his forearm; the last time they had ever spoken was in the Charms corridor at the start of Sirius’s sixth year just after Alphard died: Sirius asked if there was anything he could do and if there was anything Regulus needed in an embarrassing, blatantly transparent ploy to get Regulus to talk to him at all, and Regulus had smiled coldly and told him that their mother had already petitioned for control of Alphard’s estate. He saw little of Regulus after that even at meals in the Great Hall and doubted he had ever graduated. As such his mind filled in the blanks with the slideshow detritus of burnt letters and skinned knees and frightened knocks on his bedroom door late at night, laughter bubbling up as Sirius showed him how to kick underwater, exploding snap and sneaking onto the balcony to watch the Muggle fireworks at New Year’s, stuffed animals lining a little boy’s twin bed. Pudgy hands and a sweet tooth and a fierce love of rabbits and dogs and any and all deep-sea creatures. When he grew up he wanted to be a magical archaeologist and for the first ten years of his life he had trailed happily after Sirius. And then he hadn’t.

Some things could never be made right again. From the corner of his eye he watched Remus look out across the blazing August valley and then back to the side of Sirius’s head like he thought Sirius wouldn’t notice, very slowly, like he’d caught the scent of something deadly; then he pulled up short and stopped rigidly as if he’d been hit with a stinging hex.

Upon the pale straw grass a few feet from the shore was a long ribbon-shrewd scorch mark, the earth blackened to char in a dagger-fine line from the exposed silt at the water’s edge cutting all the way into the small patch of thistle at the base of one of the fells. It was unnaturally cold to the touch, glacial, insensate. When Sirius pulled his hand away it came up thick with soot, the lines of his palms standing out stark white, the skin burning and freezing until he rinsed it off in the water.

“Curse?” asked Remus, watching him with a stiff, unblinking blankness. Carefully he stepped around it until his feet were level with the shore, hanging back a few paces from Sirius. “I can’t think of what else would do that.”

“It looks like someone had a fight. I can’t tell how recent it is but it’s still got that, you know how a body-bind feels for a few minutes after it’s lifted? Like this weird numb itch?” He knelt again to examine a strange arrangement of twigs but could read nothing; he rarely could with the branches of divination that bordered on the apocryphal. Remus snorted.

“Purebloods can leave the fold but they can’t leave behind the suspicion,” said Remus, who was himself giving the twigs a look of wary respect over Sirius’s shoulder.

“Acting superior about it won’t change your cosmic fate or the fact that I know you took divination through seventh year. I know you’re looking.”

“If I had to guess—it looks less like a curse-mark and more like it came up against something meant to kill, or something huge,” said Remus, eyes on the seared ground again. “Or both.”

He shielded his eyes and looked out across the swell of the hill at the lip of the copse where nothing moved. Thus far he himself had used deadly force three times, and only once had it connected; for days afterwards he smelled nothing but blood. “I’d guess you’re right.”

Behind him he could hear Remus step forward uncertainly once, then again, circling, that old nervous habit of his, like a wounded animal craving and fearing warmth. “You told me once your brother couldn’t swim.”

“As far as I know he never learned, unless it was after I left, but that doesn’t seem likely. Whenever we went swimming he’d always cast a charm, or my mother would—he didn’t want to learn and she didn’t make him. He was afraid of water.”

“But she made you?”

“No, my dad put me in the Thames. Incidentally that was also the first time I can ever remember doing magic and meaning to. But he never had any patience for Regulus. He never had any for me either but he showed it differently.” By a certain age, thirteen or maybe fourteen, his father’s favorite word for him was _insubordinate_. “Over the summers when we were really young I used to try to teach him. Probably not hard enough.”

“Sirius—it’s not. It isn’t your fault.”

Coming from Remus this was hilarious for a variety of infuriating and abjectly miserable reasons but tactfully he bit down on it, knowing from a long violent history of crybaby self-psychoanalysis that traveling those roads only led to the kind of mental hemorrhaging he couldn’t afford right now. Instead he pushed his sweaty hair out of his face and said, “You know it’s fucking weird to be talking to you.”

“Having this sprung on me overnight isn’t exactly easy for me either,” said Remus, quietly. “So I do know, for the record.”

“I used to think about it. Like, you coming back in the middle of the night. Telling you to suffocate with your head up Dearborn’s ass. Telling you to fuck off.”

“That doesn’t surprise me. For a while I thought maybe you’d come after me and I’d tell you to fuck off and die too.”

“Why would I? You had everything you wanted until you didn’t, and when you didn’t it sure as hell wasn’t any fault of your own because it never is. Break everything and then run away and let everyone else clean up your mess. Half the time Remus I can’t decide if I want you to know what it feels like or if I just want you to be happy very far away from me.” Out of the west, at last, a humid breeze caught in the boughs of the trees and whispered in his hair, softly, softly, like the earth had begun to breathe again, urging them on. “Odds favor both of us being dead by the end of the year anyway so it’s not as if any of this matters. I don’t know why I’m even saying any of this to you.”

Two or three years ago, in the hallowed predawn before the horrorshow truly began—even as late as this time last year—Remus would have held him, would have said, Shhh, shhh, don’t say that, don’t, don’t. He would have done the same for Remus, and had; likely it would have ended as it usually did, with both of them eschewing cooking or cleaning or any plans that weren’t getting a curry or falafel and eating in bed and spending an hour on foreplay before they fucked slowly in the enchanted golden gloaming coming in through the window, the kind of sex that was like a purging or an unraveling, soul-deep, pouring themselves into each other’s open mouths and open hands, soldered at the hips and the knees and the shoulders, made of the same body, split from the same atom. But because that was then and this was now Remus crushed a leggy weed under the toe of his boot and asked, “Did Vance do the math on it again?”

“Yeah. So if we survive this I’m putting thirty galleons on your boyfriend,” said Sirius, before he realized just what it sounded like. “Come on. We might as well have a look over the fells as long as we’re somewhere halfway pleasant.”

“That kind of payoff could buy you a ticket to just about anywhere a few times over,” said Remus. “I think I’d buy a one-way plane ticket to the Sonoran Desert with everything I could carry.”

“I’d say I’d do it too but knowing our luck we’d meet each other somewhere in the middle.”

He had missed this the way he had missed everything else he’d ever taken for granted: good dreams, good nights, riding the Tube without looking over his shoulder the whole time, the certainty of surviving a trip to the late-night shop round the corner for cigarettes and chocolate, being able to see James and Lily whenever he wanted, being around Peter for more than three minutes without his nerves splintering. Dorcas and Marlene. His appetite. His taste for red meat and gin. _The Modern Lovers_ , to which he could no longer listen. What felt like half his soul. Long letters. Walking along Regent’s Canal late at night. Talking to Remus—just hearing his voice, just being near him, like he had been starved for even the memory of their closeness, which after nearly a decade was less like missing an arm or a leg and felt more like being an amputated limb. Being near him hurt but it had hurt before this, too. And as before he took the pain to mean he was still in love.

At infrequent intervals over the years he’d wondered if Regulus missed him at all and couldn’t help wondering if he had thought of him in those last unbreathing, heartbeatless moments at the very end, or in whatever doubtful thereafter he’d found. As he walked with Remus hunting death into the swallowing shade of the yew trees in the strange burnt light of the summertime valley, the slurry clouds gathering like years passing by as their shadows blurred on the pale grass, he knew it was ridiculous to think the dead missed anything.

—

The end came down like a guillotine strike in mid-October 1980 with the familiar heartbreak-shattering that accompanied the sudden heat death of any relationship: it began with an out-of-tune chord in September of that year, a couple of months after the screaming fights had begun, as Remus seemed to be working increasingly odd, long hours at the mail-order potions supply warehouse in Lambeth where he sorted and filled inquiries part-time, and it ended with a gunshot arpeggio a month later, when what was supposed to be a three-day liaison with local magical government and law enforcement in the Midlands alongside Caradoc Dearborn turned into an eight-day excursion all the way to Brighton with the inconspicuous cloak-and-dagger of a blaring red neon scream. They had at least deigned to tell Dumbledore where they were. To Sirius Remus said nothing for the duration.

Later Sirius found out that the trip was unsurprisingly Dearborn’s idea, who had promised to take all of the fall while understanding none of the consequences for Remus. Their explanation—that they had chased a Death Eater on a tip all the way to Surrey, and anyway they weren’t needed anywhere else yet, and yes, terribly irresponsible, but the possessing romance of it, you know—had satisfied a handful of Order members, Dumbledore included, who recognized it for obvious but not malicious bullshit and dropped it, content to gossip merrily as soon as backs were turned; this kind of idiot flightiness was what happened, after all, during wartime: suicides and divorces and ill-advised quickie marriages and waves of pregnancies and a certain inability to keep one’s amorous hands to oneself. People were not themselves in these traitorous times. We understand, et cetera. But it had done Remus especially no good whatsoever among those who had begun some time ago to view him with suspicion, either because they suspected his lycanthropy, or because they knew he was gay (some of them would have denied this even as they eyed him like a thief and ushered their children away from him and from Sirius with blithe smiles, as if they themselves were unaware of what they were doing), or because of his coldness—his distance—the hard scorched-earth thing that had set in his face after he’d come back from his first solitary trip to the Black Mountains in the spring, where only his closest friends knew he had held congress with a pack of werewolves. In July of that year around the same time Dumbledore started sending Sirius on raids Remus had met the monster, Greyback himself, on the freezing Gulf of Riga, though he would scarcely talk about it.

Sirius himself hadn’t gone to the meeting because he didn’t want to face either of them and as such heard all of it secondhand from James, who looked exhausted and very sad, who of course knew everything although they had never really told him anything. All day after he left Sirius drank firewhiskey while his thoughts ricocheted off each other and burst with a careening lunatic frenzy as the violent fantasies in which he seduced Dearborn and then bit his cock off gave way to the swooning, desolate nostalgia i.e. the unstoppable breathless sobbing. It was the worst he thought he could ever feel: knowing that this person who was the unceasing confluence of all his dreams, whose very existence had infiltrated every corner of his soul—that this person didn’t want him. For hours that afternoon the rapid-fire plummet from rage to misery to self-hate to throttling grief and back again—hitting every banal cliffside bathos of the cheated and the humiliated and the lovesick along the way—made him nauseous, whiplashed, until the pain was almost physical; he felt rotten with love, churned with it, scraped raw with it, ruined with it. When at last he puked after a significant liquid lunch he thought his insides were wailing it—love love love love love filling up his lungs and his heaving guts and his hundred thousand hopeless capillaries. If you looked down his throat you’d see it climbing tumescent up the walls into his sinuses and around his stomach. He must glow in the goddamn dark.

Because he couldn’t stop himself he tried to imagine what their sex was like. Dearborn was bigger than Remus but not as tall—Sirius had a good two inches on him. He was blond and blue-eyed and wore an earring in his right ear and had a dated haircut imported from circa 1968. He was a half-blood from a happy upper middle class Suffolk family, a Hufflepuff with a penchant for terrible piss-soaked prog rock and bad confessional poetry as evinced by his seventh year creative writing project in Muggle Studies, but his countercurse-work was good and he was a quick and innovative potion-maker, and he was abrasively good-natured in a way that straddled a narrow border between placidity and antagonism, with no qualms about openly hitting on Remus, which had often irritated Sirius to jealousy. He was blandly handsome in a way that did nothing for Sirius, with an absurdly round ass and a thick neck; when he came he probably spurted fountains. 

Without a doubt Dearborn would be on top: he and Remus had experimented athletically to that end several times but Remus hadn’t liked it much. Probably at first Remus had bent over Dearborn’s kitchen table or gotten on his knees on his bed with his cock straining against the sheets, or maybe he’d let Dearborn think the whole thing was his idea as he stretched out on the couch and watched Dearborn suck him off, probably pulling off repeatedly to flip his fucking hair out of his eyes. Maybe he liked it when Dearborn put a hand around his neck and squeezed—maybe Remus did it to him like he did it to Sirius, riding him with the seductive heartbeat-whisper moving under his palm. He imagined Remus finger-fucking Dearborn under the pier at Brighton late at night tracing just his wet fingers around his hole the way he did with Sirius, giving him just the tip and sliding their cocks together, his thighs around Dearborn’s waist on a blanket at some hidden rocky shoreline, spidery fingers circling an incantation in the notches of his spine, Dearborn’s cock slipping out of him after he clumsily thrust in too hard; he’d take one look at Remus underneath him and come inside him in thirty seconds. Anyone would.

The key didn’t turn in the lock until after seven o’clock that evening, fumbling with it, the mercy of those few shrill last moments like a finger’s-grip at the edge of something. When Remus stepped in and shut the door behind him he just stood in the foyer with his backpack hanging off one shoulder, the gauzy night-light coming through the curtains Sirius hadn’t bothered to close and catching on the crooked bridge of his nose, his tangled hair, the jut of his collarbone in his unzipped jacket, the narrow, wiry strength in his shoulders and the shadows under the clench of his jaw, ready for a fight; wildly he thought of old Symbolist depictions of death, singing outside windows, watching from the doorway with the infernal obsession of a lover, starved with desire. He remembered coming home and finding his drawers rifled through, Remus gone without leaving a note, how brittly they’d fought when Sirius read his mail. Altogether too fucking late he realized he had mistaken the ticking of the bomb for the sound of his heart.

Slowly they went to each other as if drawn inexorably on the same gravitational ley line that had led them to each other in everything, a miraculous collision course of train compartments and mandrake leaves and wintertime woods and Arcadia behind the parted bed-curtains leading into an unmapped country where there were warm twin indents in the early-morning sheets and shared cigarettes and lavender tea late at night and their record collection and the sound of the front door opening and their skin like an artist’s canvas stretched over both of them in one continuous line, a tangled triptych of becoming, all their uncharted future cartographies left to be traveled, their promises, their dreams, their sanctified secrets, their pain and their love and their fears and their best and their worst and their unlived history to be discovered, sketched out, rerouted, made new. Being near Remus was like having a taste of something holy: he could not imagine what his life had been before he had known it. Its touch had changed him and its warmth had fed him. Remus’s fists tugged at the collar of his flannel shirt and then at the sides of his face, his knuckles clammy and rough, violet shadows in the hollows under his eyes, hurting but unyielding, almost challenging. Then Sirius shoved him back into the wall so hard it shook their street fair art crooked and rattled the photos on the mantel.

In lieu of talking they fucked, which was not an infrequent occurrence of late. He had Remus on his knees on the hardwood floor in the living room, Sirius’s hands splayed over his belly and up his hip to the artful scars around his ribcage to his chest where his heart beat against the bars like a trapped bird, echoing down the buttons of his spine against Sirius’s until it felt like they would both shake apart; Remus kept thrusting his hips back into Sirius, trying to get him to fuck him faster, but he wouldn’t oblige. He settled his hips against Remus’s, slowly, slowly, thrusting shallowly, hardly moving at all, his cock sliding relentlessly against the spot that made Remus’s body tighten desperately with the friction of it, clawing at the floor, the delirious lightning-flare shooting along Sirius’s cock to his thighs to his toes. Pleasure like blown-glass, vibrating like a struck cord flowing into and out of him where he was inside of Remus, his teeth at the back of Remus’s neck.

Vengefully he pulled out—Remus hissed like a lit fuse—and flipped Remus onto his back, pressing only the head of his cock to Remus’s hole and stroking himself slowly, watching the wet rim stretch around him before he pulled back and sucked a rosebud-imprint on the inside of his thigh, Remus’s hips lifting desperately until he finally reached down and wrapped a trembling hand around Sirius’s when he pressed his cock against him again, trying to guide him inside. Immediately Sirius grabbed his wrists and pinned them over his head in a bruising vise-crush, watching the length of him spread out on the floor, all his pale skin and his breath and his sweaty hair splayed around his head in a crown of thorns, his weedy grace, the torque of the muscles in his belly, pleading; he pressed inside again all at once, fast enough to hurt, feeling Remus clench around his cock as if Sirius still wasn’t deep enough inside him. 

Watching the hypnotic join of their bodies he snapped his hips, settling into a ruthless and percussive rhythm, nearly pulling out, then filling Remus deep, wondering feverishly if he’d ever shown Dearborn his long and holy throat like he was right now, if Dearborn even knew what to fucking do with it—if he’d ever let him bite it—if Dearborn even _knew_. Underneath him Remus gasped, canting his hips to take Sirius deeper, the secret curl of his spine arching delicately when Sirius thrust into the golden twist of lightning inside him, his body nearly screaming please-please-please in the clutch of his thighs and his heart in his chest for Sirius to touch his cock, which was wet and blood-hot against his belly, quivering heavily between them every time Sirius thrust into him. One of his hands touched them where Sirius was inside him, feeling the push and pull of skin into skin, the tidal swell of their bodies moving together, breathing and changing and grieving and giving and taking, as if they were two pieces of the same broken thing, as if parts of them dwelled forever somewhere inside each other, the truest possession, haunting each other like all the other ghosts. 

He bit down on Remus’s neck, tasting blood or tears, catching his moan between his teeth. He could almost feel Remus’s magic in a static theremin hum under his skin, their bodies locked like ritual—vibration, faster—all Remus’s skin against him lit up and yearning, the swallowing heat of him around his cock—the sonic race-and-melt, burning high all through him like sonar echoes, breaking, overflowing—Sirius thrust deep inside him and came, choking something back behind his teeth, his cock pulsing as Remus tightened his thighs around him and worked his hips. Finally he wrapped his hand around Remus’s cock, still half-hard inside him; it took all of four strokes—he brushed his thumb across the wet slit—and Remus came all over both of them like he hadn’t been fucked in a year, his spine a fragile arch and his mouth just open, voiceless, the blunt edges of his teeth bared in the dark.

“How long,” Sirius asked once he’d cleaned up and lit a cigarette. His voice was gone even though he’d hardly said a word; all he could think of was how rarely Remus did anything without studying the patterns first, tracking the emotional calculus of every fractured possibility before he decided it was worth the gamble even if he lost. How long he would let himself want something, how carefully he took it. None of this could have been a spontaneous decision to fuck someone else after a few whiskeys in some shitty shadow-lit pub across the city.

“Sirius, I don’t—”

“I asked you a fucking question,” he bit out, so loudly the neighbors could probably hear, though it was hardly the first time; dimly he recognized something of his father’s voice in the razor’s-edge of the tone that made him flinch harder than it did Remus. “If you can’t answer it you can get your clothes on and walk right back out the door.”

“A month. Early September.”

At the back of his throat he tasted bile again. He’d already put his jeans back on but he wished his t-shirt and his flannel weren’t all the way across the room, his chest and his belly exposed, the tender jut of his ribs, the obvious swill of blood in his nervous veins. “Well. Congratulations.” Never in his life had he been so close to an involuntary _Incendio_. “You’ve obviously wanted it for a while so I’m glad for you, you know, that you took the chance and sucked his cock instead of ever mentioning that you were unhappy. Or ever talking to me once at all.”

“Fuck you,” said Remus. His eyes were blazing something acid, like he wanted to hit Sirius or he wanted Siriu to hit him, worse than any spell Sirius had ever been caught with. “Fuck you—you _know_ , you fuck. You’ve made me insane. How could you not know. None of us are happy.”

“None of us are happy so you blow off the Order and go get fucked by Mr. Sunglasses Indoors at high tide.”

“Everything’s really that simple for you, isn’t it,” asked Remus, “or at least it is where anyone else is concerned. Nothing is ever your fault and all that matters are your fucking oversized steamroller feelings.”

“Then condescend to explain it to me for once in your fucking life, asshole. Because at this point I think you sure as hell owe me that much.”

“When have we ever talked about anything.”

“When have you ever _tried_?”

 

“When have _you_?” Remus had gotten up from the floor to stand by the window, slouching terribly. There were bruises forming already in red weals around his knees over some that were old and fading; he hadn’t bothered putting anything on or cleaning up and Sirius could see his come sliding down his thighs. “Do you think I don’t see it every goddamn time I walk into a room. Do you really.”

“I don’t—”

“Don’t you dare fucking act like you don’t know.” Remus was watching him across the muzzy light with a wild cauterizing pain like something dying, his face crumpling into something Sirius had never seen before, burnt-out and stretched as if on a rack. He looked like an open wound; both of them did, one bled dry, the other rotting from the core. “I see the way you look at me, it’s been, God, I don’t know how long now. Months at least. Before I got back from Estonia—”

“You wouldn’t talk about—”

“And you won’t talk to me about your fucking raids either, and you wouldn’t try to understand, so what difference does it make? Neither of us is, we’re not the same. And I thought I could live with that but it’s, it’s like there’s nothing left. Nothing of me, anyway, it’s like I left everything somewhere and I can’t find where I lost it but it’s gone. And then you—I see it. I see it every time I walk through this fucking door. I know how you look at me. I know what you think.”

So help him Sirius couldn’t meet his eyes after a beat. “Like I fucking said, you don’t tell me anything. I still don’t know where you go half the time, I never—I feel like all I do is wait on you, wait on you to come home, wait on you to tell me any goddamn thing, wait on something to happen because I know it will, and you never give me anything. Not once. I don’t even fucking know what I did,” he said, though it was a lie. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d cried in front of Remus—January ‘76, in the hospital wing?—but he felt his lips twitch and his eyes blurred in the burn of the light, something inside him tearing as if he was made of crepe paper. “I’ve—do you really not understand what it looks like every time I come home and you’re not there. Or when you take four hours to get fucking _groceries_. What the hell am I supposed to think when you won’t even talk to me.”

“But it’s alright when _you_ do it. Or when James or Peter or Dorcas do it.” He took a breath. “You think you’re so much different than your family. Than your brother.”

“God. Fuck you.”

“This is, you know what this is about. It’s the same thing it’s always been and I thought you could get past it but you never have, don’t—shut up. Just don’t. You never have and you know it and if you haven’t by now you never will.” He was staring at the window where a grey rain had started, tracking the nervous trails across the glass. “You never will.”

“I love you,” he said, worthlessly.

“Not all of me.”

“Remus. Jesus fuck. I do.”

“You can say that until you choke and it won’t make a bit of fucking difference because I know better. You say one thing and do another and half the time you don’t even try to say it, it’s like, I don’t know, like you’re daring me to leave. And everything—every single thing Sirius, it all comes back to January of sixth year, whether you’ll ever admit it or not. Or whether you even realize it.”

He got up from the floor because his heartbeat was making his head spin until he felt trapped in his own body. When he looked down in the strange smoke-fogged light he saw where Remus’s ragged fingernails had left red half-moon weals on his arms, the sting of them sharpening on his back and shoulders, unclouded by the waning adrenaline. “You forgave me,” he said, watching the bare fragile arch of Remus’s shoulders at the window. “You said you—Remus. This isn’t—”

“All you said you do is wait for me,” said Remus, very quietly, stone rasping over stone. Still he wouldn’t look at Sirius. “But you don’t have a single goddamn clue what that’s really like. I’ve been waiting on you since I was fourteen years old. Waiting for you to notice I was in love with you and wanting you to never know, waiting for you to realize, waiting for you to change, waiting for you to apologize, waiting for you to come home, waiting for you to accept it—all of it, let me in all the way, waiting for you to say anything to me for almost year now, just any fucking thing. And if you can’t, if that hasn’t changed by now, it’s never going to. And all of this is, it doesn’t change anything for you, you’ve got nothing really at stake—you don’t know what it’s like to really be afraid, I mean truly fucking terrified for anything but the novelty of it. No matter what happens, even if we live through this, nothing changes. You’ll still be the same person and I’ll still be the dog at the table waiting for scraps.”

It was unfair and yet even then he recognized that it wasn’t exactly untrue, or not all of it, and as he listened Sirius had pressed the heels of his hands into the deep hollows of his eyes as if he couldn’t look at another thing. “You’re so, fuck. Are you really so blinded by your own suffering that you just don’t care about anyone else’s? That you really think that of me?”

“Listen to you. You ask for it and then when you get it you don’t want to hear it.”

“I just—bloody Christ, why didn’t you just leave? Why waste any more of your fucking time with me? You can’t even fucking look at me—what are you supposed to fucking be, the holy wounded lying in repose? Did you convince him you’re _normal_ or something, because he’s just about the type to buy that shit from someone like you.” From the window the light from the street below warped around Remus, his eyes blurring with it, wrung out, ripped at the seams, sucked into black-hole nothing; soon there would be nothing left. When he laughed it sounded like something half-dead, a stabbed or poisoned lover gathering just enough strength to curse and/or kill his murderer, an animal caught in a trap in the dead dreamless night. At any other time it would’ve made him sick to hear. “Afraid Dearborn might make you pay rent? Is that it? Because that sounds about right.”

This was some kind of exquisite vengeance, he thought as he watched Remus finally turn around at the window, not breaking eye contact, watching each other across the seething void they’d made in anticipation of some inevitable consummate destruction begun long ago. Lovers craved this at the moment of their betrayal: gunshots and snakebites and hysterical sturm und drang at the very knife’s-edge of a seaside cliff, hatred sharpened on the sight of each other, doorknobs painted with poison. The last love song of the traitor and the betrayed, the violins swelling on the apogee, blood spilled like orgasm. The apotheosis of agony. Yet all he could think of was how much they both looked like bad actors who were in very dearly over their heads, the dusty-blue light, their bodies trailing old sweat and smoke and sex and sour metallic fear, their eyes overbright, dense like dying stars.

“He’s an easier person than you,” said Remus. In Sirius’s head a strange insect-drone of noise washed out his heartbeat. “If you have to know.”

A bad headache had already begun to set in deep on one side of his head; no matter how much they had borne together this was the end. Something felt like it had burst in his chest, bleeding coldly inside him like an icepick wound dripping venom, blown to rubble along the hair-trigger perforations that had formed months ago, or years ago, that were perhaps the entire foundation of this staggering, jelly-legged thing between them. “Then you’re in love with him,” he asked, so quietly he wasn’t sure Remus had heard. Through the ringing in his ears it sounded almost pathetically weak, useless and thwarted and beaten, like a finger tracing the fine crystal rim of a wine glass, shattering as heartbreak or yearning. “Why did you—Remus. Didn’t,” but he couldn’t finish. “I love you. You can’t just—fuck you. Fuck you for trying to take that from me.”

“For as long as I’ve know you you just assume that, that everyone else feels the same way you do because nothing is bigger or more important or more miraculous than your fucking feelings. That’s never changed.” The jackknife-twist of his body at the window reminded Sirius of how he looked just before the transformation, the pain opening him up and zipping along familiar synapse-circuitry, the final tidal shift. Something had changed in the shape of them and he had not realized until now. “Not this war, not my NEWTs or whether I’ll have a job next month or whether it’s a great idea to live here or if you’re even equipped to do half the shit the old man asks you to do. None of it means shit because you can’t understand why anyone else wouldn’t feel exactly what you do. You’re all that matters.”

“You’re saying that to _me_. You fuck.”

In the window Remus drew himself up to his full height, taller by a fingernail’s-breadth than Sirius, his shadow unslouching across the floor, swallowing light. “Don’t. You’re—that’s not my fault or my problem.”

“So do you swallow for him?” A laugh, again, a wash of noise like breaking glass over the crown of his head. “Your better, easier man. Since you’ve had your mouth attached to his dick for the last month.”

“Stop it,” said Remus. Outside a drunk was shouting something in the street. “Just stop.”

“What are you gonna do when your good, easy, perfect dream of a man who’s making you so fucking incandescently happy and apparently giving you the fuck of your life figures out that you’re none of those things? When he realizes you use him like a goddamn drug. That you’ll never love him the way he wants.”

Remus’s body coiled like a noose or a cobra, the edges of his teeth just catching on the light the way the wolf’s did on the acid-lance of the moon through the trees before it snapped over a rabbit’s throat. “I could love him. I’ve never been sure of that before now,” said Remus. He didn’t blink. “But with him—I could be in love with him.” And then: “I would like to be.”

The next morning he smoked a joint on the couch as the nauseous hangover throbbing ebbed away and watched Remus pack his things until he had to get out of the flat because being there was like having his liver sucked out through a straw, his body leaden with the accumulations of time and love. Walking along Regent’s Canal phrases from books and ribbons of songs winged into his head but nothing truly stuck except a line he’d read in the dedication of a book of poetry: _O you who drown in love, remember me_. An inscription on a funerary urn, wistful old-fashioned pathos. He’d read it for a project in Muggle Studies fifth year and had never forgotten it; he wondered who the other person was and whether they even knew. Now he wondered whether they would’ve wanted it at all or if perhaps the entire thing was the singular delusion of some stupid fuck not far removed from his own pathetic wallowing via some spiritus mundi of the jilted and the cheated, bearing their love up to nothing and no one across an impossible chasm, echoing back at them like endless squalling reverb, unanswered and unconsummated.

Someone was playing “Station to Station” at the crosswalk when he finally made his way home just after sunset and he stood on the curb until the light changed again to listen to it fade into the autumn clamor of the city at the first kiss of the blue hour: _It’s not the side effects of the cocaine, I’m thinking that it must be love_... He’d laughed all the way back to the flat as the evening crowds parted for him like the Red Sea. Poor stupid strung-out baby. Of course it was the coke.

All around the flat were moth-bitten holes in the fabric they had so carelessly sewn and remade and patched over, books missing from the shelves like toothless gaps, the nonsense alphabet of their record collection sliced into sparse fringe, an empty closet, no tea in the pantry, bullet holes in the bathroom cabinet, one pair of shoes, one toothbrush, one dirty coffee cup in the sink, the bedroom wiped clean of the fingerprint-stains of history. There was a faint scent of lavender hanging on the air when he sat down at the foot of the bed the way it did after one of them had just come out of the shower; he could never remember feeling so exhausted, and he knew he needed to eat something but he couldn’t find the energy to do much but roll another joint and think abstractly about how he could rearrange the flat so the blank spaces didn’t show so badly. The next night when he couldn’t stand the quiet or the strange new shadows he tried to cast a patronus for the jittering golden warmth of the dog but for the second time in his life he couldn’t do it; he tried not to worry too much as he’d often found that half the will to summon it was in the adrenaline, the horror nearly indistinguishable from joy after one escaped with one’s life and all ten fingers intact. Dimly he thought that maybe he deserved it. Sleepless and freezing around midnight he put on the dog and curled up on the couch where Remus’s colorful afghan used to be and didn’t wake up until his alarm went off in the bedroom at six and one of the neighbors pounded irritatedly on the wall.

When he began to fill the gaps in the following weeks—rearranging the furniture, buying new rugs for the living room, carrying home armfuls of secondhand books and records from a thrift store in Covent Garden, draping Mexican blankets someone was selling at a stall in Bermondsey across the end of the bed and the couch, replacing photos on the mantel with postcards, changing the sheets, bringing a Muggle man home from a bar in Chalk Farm, pretending he was happy or would ever be happy again—he had an epiphany so intense while making too much pasta primavera for dinner (he still wasn’t used to cooking for just himself) that it bordered on a vision, as if his powers of divination had come into late flower: he let the water boil over while he stared at the wall with his face stuck in some no man’s land between crying and laughing as it dawned somewhere deep in his sad crack-brained soul that he understood. 

And who wouldn’t? Who wouldn’t exchange what IS for what COULD BE if given the chance to free themselves from the arthritic ache of shared history, from the person who fed you, who licked your wounds clean and carried you home, who made you come too fast or not at all, who was insecure, who was oblivious, who was sometimes selfish and always too much too big too deep too soon, who took forever in the shower, who said the right thing at the wrong time, who contrived not to understand what they had done wrong, who loved you nakedly, murderously, timorously. You find something better, someone easier, someone who hasn’t yet tracked mud into every cobwebbed corner of your soul. Someone with whom you have no past, no pain, no conflict, no freighted history. Someone newer and softer, someone who will always put you first, someone who can make you feel the way you used to, before the grief and the fear froze deep; someone who has never disappointed you, someone you have never tired of, someone who has never hurt you, and you—darling lovesick idiot motherfucker—you get it in your head that they never will, don’t you.

He laid on the couch listening to the November snow kiss the windowpanes and laughed until he cried. Did it upset you, he wondered, when you realized I was a human being and not just a place to rest your head? That I wasn’t the unspoiled Caravaggio you loved behind the glass at the museum any more than you were the runic map to lost places I kept trying to unravel. And what have we done to each other, what perfect unhealing pain have we torn into the scintilla of each other’s very souls—and what have you left me with but these splinters I keep finding in my gut and this shiver like a gestating sickness whenever I remember, and when I wake up in the night I keep coughing up shards of your inviolable fucking memory, my mouth keeps freezing around the shape of your name, I cannot eat and I hardly sleep, and did you love me, did you ever love me, could you have ever, or did you just think I was someone else, and now neither of us can pretend anymore?

—

The day before the full moon they found a body at Derwentwater, hidden among a dense thicket of trees in the valley between two of the fells to the west. Sirius had already sweat through his shirt in the heat and was thinking it would be nice to take his clothes off and maybe drown himself a little when Remus called nervously to him from down the hill; the moon seemed to be gnawing relentlessly on his bones in a way Sirius hadn’t seen for years, making him angry and turning him inwards, his shoulders tense and his head down, as if he was trying to contain the pain to a tight ball at his core. That morning at breakfast Sirius had seen him eat half a triangle of toast and nothing else, and as such he thought the heat had just gotten to him before he followed Remus’s voice and found at his feet a half-charred body and a suitcase arranged comically with one arm bent at the elbow and the handle sticking out just beneath, like a chalk outline in a shitty crime drama.

“It’s not,” Remus started, and never finished. 

“No.” The body was wearing a man’s suit but looked like no one he knew; he would’ve known Regulus anywhere, in any form, in any life, a scent or a note like a ghost calling to him underneath everything else. “Do a _cave inimicum_ , would you?”

Although the entire area stank of petrol (they found a bottle of it a few feet away on the scorched grass, jarringly pristine and clearly meant as a tidy explanation for any Muggles who stumbled on the body) it was obvious the person had been hit by a curse, possibly the same one they’d seen remnants of at Wastwater, and more obvious still that they hadn’t belonged here: they were clearly a Death Eater, as they found when they took off the tweed jacket and found a wide rectangle of flesh cut off with near-surgical precision on the left forearm where the dark mark would have been, and thus Sirius suspected some kind of deal gone wrong or perhaps internal strife among Voldemort’s close ranks. The fingerprints had all been sanded off and the clothing was missing its tags; the suitcase seemed to have been monogrammed at some point as it was missing a portion of fabric at the very center near the top, and the clasps were already undone when they opened it to find nothing but an empty daily planner (no spell revealed anything) and a wizarding passport with all the pages ripped out, along with a half-empty bottle of very expensive brandy and two dirty tumblers. Upon the neck where the skin was unburnt were what appeared to be a couple of hickeys, the eyes burst in the sockets. Looking at the clothing and the charred face and the shriveled fingers with acid-white bone visible in the joints Sirius supposed they might have been in their forties or fifties but of course it was impossible to tell for sure, and this line of thought was thrown further into question when something caught Remus’s attention and he opened the mouth to find that they were missing all their teeth, the nerve-pulp still visible in a few of the sockets.

Unreal, to think that there was a time in his life when all of this would have shaken him down to the bone, that for months he would see it every time he closed his eyes. Two months ago he’d helped scrape what was left of Benjy Fenwick off the walls of his house into a wooden box and as such he felt inured to nearly anything—as much, at least, as Remus had become nearly a year ago, when Sirius realized he had changed, that something had a hold on him, when he thought idiotically that he could love it all away. Now it was just another body.

“Could your brother have done this,” Remus asked, staring into the blank eye sockets.

“I haven’t really known Regulus for a long time,” said Sirius. “I don’t know what he could’ve done.”

When he stole a sideways look at Remus he was clenching his jaw, still watching intently at the face as if it would start talking any minute. “They take the skin,” said Remus, very slowly, “when one of them angers Voldemort or one of his finest. Where the mark would be. Greyback had a few of them.”

“Jesus.”

“He wore them sometimes,” said Remus. Jaggedly he turned his head sideways and spat. “It’s like they want to pretend they’re vigilante cult kings in some version of the American West, complete with the same delusions. And that’s sort of how they peddle it to other werewolves, vampires, basically every part-human—Greyback’s people, anyway. The rest just feed you the same line of bullshit the Order does in a different package—like, you poor thing, don’t you have so much to lose, isn’t it just awful for you, we can make it better. Et cetera.”

This was as much as Remus had ever told him about his mission to Latvia last year and he felt his heart pick up and expand in his chest despite everything, the sound of their breath out of tune and not much else, wild and hopeful, and afraid. “Remus,” he started, like coaxing a feral animal, “what did—”

Behind them something snapped like springtime ice or a broken branch, but he couldn’t see anyone, and unless something had countered Remus’s spell nothing should have been able to see them. Everything smelled like dust and death, the heat wilting the trees and the grass and the tangled wildflowers under the heavy glass dome of the unforgiving midday sun, the earth parched and cracked like the skin of an elephant, muzzy insect-drone overhead, the smell of petrol and sulphur and burnt skin and bone stinging his nose and throat, heartbeat and heartbeat and heartbeat in the spreading shrill glass eternity—then an echoing thunder-crush as he got the shield up just a fraction too late and something hit Remus across the shoulders in a splintering lash, dropping him to his knees almost like a supplicant. He could barely see anything through the firework bursts of curses and began to fear he wouldn’t be able to keep it up until whoever it was decided to cut and run, having apparently exhausted themselves and/or their magic in a suicide gamble that hadn’t quite hit its mark; Sirius chased them for half a mile, staggering under the vivid fragmenting blows glancing off the spell-shield and hissing over his head until at last he was able to petrify them as they stumbled just enough that he could fire it off with enough fatal accuracy that it hit them squarely in the middle of the back. They fell face-first with a sick meaty crunch, arms stuck to their sides like an effigy, only the sound of their frantic breathing cutting the air like a broken violin string, high and pained.

Remus was sitting up with his eyes slightly unfocused by the time the Aurors got there, his elbows and his feet sticking out at odd angles as if he’d been shuffled back together hastily by some unseen hand; one of the medical crew looked him over and said he’d be fine with rest but there was a deep bloody hellish gash across his left shoulderblade that seemed to pull at every rangy muscle when he stood up. Moody bitched at both of them for not paying enough attention and Sirius bitched at Moody ostensibly for not focusing on the petrified Death Eater (a young blonde woman not much older than Sirius, no one any of them recognized) but mostly just because he felt like bitching at someone as the adrenaline wore off and a searing headache took hold behind his eyes while the questioning chased itself into tight circles and he longed miserably for a joint and/or a drink. He still couldn’t seem to catch his breath and as he watched Remus slouch nauseously with his head between his knees he remembered that the full moon was tomorrow and wished with a flickering, guilty viciousness he couldn’t swallow that it had been him instead.

“Goddammit Black, how many times have I told you you won’t hear the counter-charm if it’s wandless,” Moody was barking, his eye swiveling to where Sirius was pacing slowly on the gentle swell of the hill, making him feel as ever like a thief with his hands dripping an incriminating red. “You’re goddamn lucky you’re not both getting dragged off to the wolves instead of changing your drawers and calling it a day. Goddamn.”

He winced reflexively at the wolf comment but Remus didn’t even flinch. Remus never did. “Well we aren’t and we also aren’t so it worked out in the end. But thank you for the fucking lecture after we just handed you another one free of fucking charge.”

“Black, I swear to God if you don’t learn to take a single goddamn precaution once in a while—I’d have said your entrails would be decorating some roadside by twenty. I don’t know how on God’s green earth you’ve made it this long but it’s sure as hell no fault of your own.” Somewhere behind them Remus made a noise through his nose that sounded half-angry and entirely pained. “If you think I’m not going to mention this to Albus—you need at least a session’s worth of counter-spell detection before I’ll—”

“I’ll practice before I tuck myself in at a reasonable hour tonight. Can I get him back to the hotel before he gets heat stroke?”

Moody glared at him for such a violently long moment Sirius swore he could feel a few hairs turning until at last he snarled, “Get the hell out of here, Black. Keep away from Muggle areas. I’ll be in touch.”

Side-along apparition was easiest when only one or two apparition points were necessary but the Death Eaters had begun tracking it through at least four points of late, so Sirius had to cast the line of the spell all the way out to Ambleside, then to Barrow-in-Furness, then from the foot of Fairfield Peak to Helvellyn and then lurching half-sideways just outside Dowthwaite Head and finally, stumbling and weak-middled, into the blazing noontide heat of Keswick. Woozily he noted that he still had all his limbs and looked Remus over through the sickly cottony film of post-apparition swarming through his head to make sure he hadn’t splinched anything dire and leaned back just as Remus paled about five shades and puked sort of gracefully in the tall grass. Right overhead the sun tore deafeningly through the bone-dull clouds.

“He was right,” said Remus, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand as they staggered into town together like wraiths just born in the forest. Nettles had snagged under Sirius’s jeans while he was running and cut through to the skin of his ankle which was just now beginning to sting. “You should’ve countered it. I don’t know what you were doing but you’ll get both of us killed.”

Sirius wiped his forehead, which in the dazed and humid crushing heat did little but transfer sweat from one place to another, and said nothing as Remus picked up the pace and walked two steps ahead of him all the way back to the hotel, never looking back, his heartbeat thrumming in his throat so fast he could almost taste it, molten and metallic.

Most of the afternoon passed in a torrential quiet as Remus drifted in and out of sleep; bored and with his heart still shaking like a loose leaf Sirius spelled the wards into place and walked alone along the wide unpeopled streets out to the eastern fringe of town, where a stone circle cut long puncture-wound shadows across the grass in the early evening flush. Unfamiliar magic welled up like a spring from the ground and hummed through the conduit of the stones when he put his hand to the flat sunlit edge of one of them and felt it resonate with his own magic in slow rippling arcs, the potency of it muted by the centuries stacked in moss and loam but still resonant deep in the earth like a buried heartbeat, mournful as a lonely shoreline with nothing and no one to bear witness. 

Old magic had always soothed him: in school he’d always been the last to finish when they took field trips to ancient resonant locations, frustrating James and Peter who was in those days often a mirror of James’s moods; he and Remus had continued together in magical theory through seventh year and would occasionally apparate illegally to the circles in the Hebrides and Skara Brae and once to Lindisfarne where they got stoned and listened to the sea, or just sat with their knees touching and one hand on the ground, feeling their magic tangle down deep in the womb of the land and through both of them like tuning forks, and he would think, this is where we come from, this is what made us—this compulsion, this yearning. Flint and tinder. Possibility and its consummation. It was the same elemental desire he’d begun to notice for Remus sometime in fifth year, chewing on his gut like a hunger pang or a nicotine craving or a song he loved, and just after their last term had started in seventh year Sirius had kissed him at dusk while they were ensconced in heavy warming charms at the Stenness stones, having thought about it for longer than he’d admit after he’d first caught Remus watching him but never questioning the impulse as closely as he knew he ought; at the time he knew Remus was hooking up increasingly frequently with Fabian Prewett but he hadn’t cared until Remus pushed him away and refused to speak to him for a week until he did it again after a brief but vengeful fight in a deserted third-floor corridor.

Years later, towards the end of things in the naked and bleeding late summer the year before, he’d told Remus in a misguided attempt at romance how being around him felt the same—like a balm or a sudden warmth suffusing every nerve, a necessity like language and heartbeat and blood, as if they had been born with some piece of each other bound inextricably inside them, as if they had always been. Something had set in Remus’s face and he’d told him it was because Sirius saw him less as a person and more as some ancient augury or indecipherable runic script on a cursed ruin choked out by vines, the kind wizards wasted away before mad and starving without ever understanding what any of it meant, and in that Sirius wasn’t as far removed from his family as he liked to think. For days he couldn’t understand why it had upset Remus so badly and was reminded uncomfortably of fifth year when he also couldn’t understand why Remus was so upset over what he’d thought was a might-have-been and nothing more, but when he apologized Remus had only shrugged and said he’d already forgotten about it, which was an obvious lie, but by then he was barely talking to Sirius. At night they slept with their backs to each other; in the mornings Remus was gone before he woke.

Wandering near the southern meniscus of the circle he felt something snap under his foot like a twig and stopped short, spreading through him in a doppler shiver all the way to the core: magic, decaying into the earth but still discernible beneath the clamor of the stones. Before he even put his hand to the wellspring at his feet he knew it was Regulus’s. Wishful and with a rare fragile reverence he put his hands to it where the spell spread out in a slash, and then with his knees bent and then his cheek pressed to the dirt like holy water in a desert he breathed in time with the faint radar-pulse until he felt it rub up against his own magic; he closed his eyes and smelled Number Twelve, furniture polish and velvet and his mother’s orchids in every room, Regulus’s sage and powdery rose when Sirius crept down the hallway during the summer thunderstorms to comfort him. It was as achingly close as he’d been to his brother for nearly a decade. When he sat up he realized he’d started crying.

Doing complex magic was dangerous in places like these where it surged raw and kinetic-electric like an underground river or a dormant volcano: if you weren’t very dearly careful you could land yourself an early retirement in St. Mungo’s making macaroni art and eating fruit cocktail from the can all the livelong day. Slowly, coaxing, Sirius drew his wand along the dim tide of magic, trying to discern the pattern of it, but he couldn’t get much from any of the spells he tried; it was heavy and densely concentrated and had the loping mushroom-cloud bloom of a countercurse, which made it even stranger that it hadn’t left any sort of mark like the one they’d seen at Wastwater: countercurses of that nature usually came up against something of equal or greater potency, and the sleepy magic of the stone circle would have magnified the voltage tenfold at least. That the echoes of it had lasted even this long indicated a desperate and seething power and a purpose that made him shiver even in the smothering red clutch of the evening heat.

To the west the sun was sinking into the low clouds over the hills, darkening the sky to a dun-colored smear and turning the light an unreal, smoky umber-yellow. He needed to get back to the hotel before Remus started wondering where he’d gone but he was afraid the weak pulse-murmur of the spell would fade into nothing before he could come back; already it was dwindling even more than it had been an hour ago, making him think of old bones picked clean, all the missing pieces of himself hollow and hurting where nothing would ever grow again. When he left it would be one less thing in his life. 

Like ripping out stitches he stood and walked away, feeling the magic ebb gently out of him the way good dreams did upon waking and went back into town where the streets were mostly empty and stony-silent, no wind and no birdsong rippling through the gloaming hush near the lake. He stopped by the grocery for cigarettes and shitty Guinness and, impulsively, a few peaches, and then bought sandwiches from a run-down pizza place that looked like a drug front about a block from the hotel where he slowed down to delay the inevitable for a few precious minutes longer. Remus was sitting gingerly against the headboard of his bed when Sirius got back, already in a big soft blue t-shirt and his boxers with the curtains still open and his hair wet from a shower, the evening news turned down very low on the television; at some point in the afternoon he’d ventured to the café across the road where they’d had breakfast and was nursing a styrofoam cup of lemonade. Next to him on the white duvet was a blueberry scone on a square of wax paper with exactly two bites taken out of it. Sirius put the food under a warming charm and headed for the shower without saying anything.

“You should try to eat something,” he said after he was out, letting his hair drip cool water down the back of his neck as the ceiling fan stirred the stale August air, watching Remus from the corner of his eye, who was watching the muted television fixedly and hadn’t moved at all. Fruit was customarily one of the few things Remus could stand to eat just before the moon, and Sirius would sometimes make him bastardized apple crumble or assorted cobblers or stop by the farmers’ market for fresh plums and bags of bright, sour clementine oranges, but he didn’t know whether that had changed since last year; reckoning it couldn’t hurt Sirius rinsed a peach in the bathroom sink and brought it to him on the bed.

“Where’d you go,” asked Remus. He was picking at the peach stem and still not looking at Sirius, all his wires and his narrow strength wrapped around himself like thread wound around a spool.

“Just to the circle outside town. Someone’s been doing magic there but I couldn’t tell exactly what, it was like—a whisper underneath a drumbeat or something. I could feel the outlines, sort of.”

“Recently?”

“Not within the last ten days at least. Like I said I could just barely pick it up and if I hadn’t walked, you know, all the way around I don’t think I’d have felt anything at all. By morning it’ll probably be gone.”

“Tomorrow we can—”

“I know it was Regulus,” said Sirius. Remus looked up at him, mouth just open showing the chipped edge of a tooth, the edges of his irises almost sepia, fever-green. “It felt like—you know what a countercurse is like, the kind of mark it leaves? Like that, but there was no mark at all, nothing out of place, just, it couldn’t have come from a fight. His was the only magic there and if someone had shot a curse at him you know it’d leave like, at the very least a burn mark full of residue. Probably worse near a magical site like that even if it didn’t hit.”

“That doesn’t make sense. Unless there wasn’t—unless he was channeling it for some reason.” Remus took a bite of the peach and covered his mouth with his hand. “If he was trying to perform it on an object, like. Sort of how cursebreaking works on the intense stuff.”

“Yeah but I’ve never heard of anything needing channeling from an ancient magical well like that. Or any _one_.” The thought had crossed his mind that Regulus was trying to perform the spell on himself or someone else, though to what end he couldn’t say: most curses that required near-mythological rituals to cure—unicorn blood, seer’s curses, bloodline curses, the ancient barriers in places like Maeshowe—generally claimed their victims’ faculties in one way or another before they could progress too deeply into the heart of darkness, and anyway it seemed unlikely he had succeeded at whatever grail quest he’d embarked upon. “Do you mind if I eat? Or I can go sit in the lobby if it’s making you sick.”

“Go ahead. It doesn’t actually smell terrible.”

“You haven’t heard from Moody yet?”

“No. Are you going to owl Dumbledore or should I?”

“I’ll take care of it,” said Sirius. Silence froze and fell like a veil.

He wrote the letter while he was eating and turned up the volume on a dismal news story about drowned holidaymakers so he could pretend Remus wasn’t in the room; the sandwich had gone a bit soggy in the foil and the cheese didn’t taste like anything but it was alright enough that Remus was enticed to pick at his until he’d eaten about half of it and split the wilted-brown salad with Sirius, shuffling through the more palatable pieces with his plastic fork until he accidentally caught Sirius’s eye at the window where he was trying to entice an owl with a rubbery piece of chicken. Swallowing the urge to start a fight Sirius opened a beer and made notes on the atlas in the place where they’d found the body that morning: it had looked, as one of the Aurors agreed, as if it had been there for at least a week undisturbed by anything except small animals, possibly longer, which made the ensuing ambush much stranger. If the intent was to use it as bait they’d have been better prepared—there would have been more of them. They’d both walked into ambushes before but this matched none of the screaming frantic-heart scorched-earth horror that so nightmarishly characterized them. The more he thought about it the more it almost seemed as though they’d set a patrol on the area—that something had caught their attention, or that they were looking for something, or for someone. For the nth fruitless and meandering time he wondered what had been in the Death Eater’s suitcase, less and less convinced with each shattering pivot of his thoughts that Regulus had not killed him.

When they’d first been recruited into the Order in that hallowed summer of ‘78 Sirius had approached the job with an amateur’s candor and bounding enthusiasm, bragging over victories with James and celebrating the acquisition of new and/or scandalous information with the galling smugness of a seventy-year-old career detective rather than an eighteen- and nineteen-year-old then-cursebreaker-in-training, as if a war that had been gouging away since he was eleven years old would be won by a group of quasi-adults barely out of school with varying degrees of gutting and dearly exploitable damage and a fondness for nascent post-punk and pot who thought they were hot shit. The first night Sirius had truly feared for his life very early in ‘79 he’d had to help question one of his father’s cousins after a bloody raid with heavy losses on both sides, someone they’d had Christmas dinners and summer parties with and put up in the guest quarters at Number Twelve for as long as he could remember; when he’d come home and told Remus about it as he was washing off at least three other people’s the blood in the bathtub he caught something on Remus’s face, unguarded, blooming over the crossbow-arc of his brows and his open mouth. 

Now he wondered if that was the first spreading dawn-stroke Remus had that this wasn’t what he wanted, that Sirius wasn’t what he thought he was after all, that he could never be. And there was James, alone and pretending he wasn’t scared shitless, and Lily like the madwoman locked in someone else’s attic, Peter who could hardly perform a warming charm some days, Dumbledore who it seemed none of them had ever really known, Dorcas and Marlene dead, Fenwick dead, the Prewetts dead, his entire life a seemingly unending litany of loss and eviscerating black-hole pain. He could not remember what Regulus’s voice had sounded like and didn’t know when exactly he forgot. Those two years in London after Hogwarts had been the happiest of his life and now he could hardly stand to think about them. Most days he could hardly stand himself and had looked half-seriously into buying unbreakable memory jars from a Knockturn Alley shop to pour himself into, but it wasn’t like he could get out of his own head.

Suddenly he had no appetite left and found that he couldn’t really taste the food, but that was such a frequent occurrence nowadays that it didn’t worry him. What did worry him was the way Remus kept glancing at him sideways like he thought Sirius wouldn’t notice, alternating between biting his lip and studying his hands, the bird bones, the nervous veins; he hated this, the way Remus would chew on something and bite off particular juicy pieces before he’d spit it out, which traditionally came back to bite him and anyone in the vicinity in the ass in creative ways. Being subject constantly to his incomplete offering and his selective withholding would’ve driven someone like Dearborn to howling, raving insanity and/or fury.

“I need to tell you something,” said Remus, slowly, apparently still rolling the something over on his tongue. Night had crept up in a wine-dark stain while he wasn’t looking and through a cloud the cold curve of the moon glowed like an acid invective through the windows, catching on the yellow amber of Remus’s eyes and making Sirius itch with undigested guilt as if Remus wasn’t the one who had left _him_.

“What.”

“This afternoon, when I went to the café. When I came out I thought—I thought I saw Peter.”

Neither his brain nor his mouth could quite work out what to say. “You thought you saw Peter.”

“I _know_ I saw Peter, he was like ten steps away from me standing by the curb but he didn’t see me. If he did likely he’d have said ‘Hi Moony’” —his imitation of Peter’s anxious West Midlands inflection was harshly but wholly accurate— “and taken off with his wand out for the nearest apparition point to London like half of you all do these days. Which he did, by the way. Apparate.”

“You saw it?”

“Felt it. He ducked into that disillusioned alley down the road and apparated away. He was gone when I went in to check just in case.”

“Doesn’t he have, didn’t his grandparents leave him that estate up north last—”

“In _Cheshire_ , not fucking Cumbria.”

“Maybe Dumbledore’s sending people to scout out the area, or for surveillance, you know he does that sometimes.”

“No one was told where we went or why.”

“So, I don’t know, he came up here for a bracing swim and a nice hike in the greenhouse humidity,” said Sirius. The urge to dismantle the room and burn everything in ritual appeasement to whatever deity might give a shit was almost unconquerably powerful. “What the hell do you think—”

“You don’t think it’s even like, the slightest fucking bit odd,” Remus interrupted, very loudly, “that Peter is here, of all places, right now, when all of this is going on? He’s barely even been in the same room with me since last summer when he got started on his fucking conspiracy theories.”

 _Conspiracy theories_ was maybe a strong way of putting it but not far off: Sirius himself had precious little patience for Peter’s whispering which of late had bordered on blatant fear-mongering, exacerbated by the fact that he was by now nearly immune to Sirius’s unsubtle hints to shut the fuck up. “None of us are _right_ ,” he said viciously. “You seemed well enough aware of that yourself. And frankly I don’t see how this is so much different from you and dearly beloved winding up in Brighton last year.”

Remus swallowed and looked at him across the tight space between the beds with his hackles raising like a warning sign. There was a look on his face Sirius had never seen before, cornered and desperate, broken wide open like glass spiderwebbed and bleeding, his wild wheaty-red hair tangled around his face in a deranged halo. “Maybe I’m going fucking insane,” he said, his mouth snarling around it, shaped like a bad dream, like a memory turned to vinegar. “God knows I feel like it most days. People won’t even look me in the eye and I can’t stand to do it myself and my friends don’t talk to me or write or call anymore, they’re either afraid of me or dead or they can’t stand me. There’s not even, if I lived through this there wouldn’t be anything worth keeping because there’s nothing of me left. I wouldn’t know where to look to find it.”

We’re not friends, he thought with a knife-glint of cruelty before he swallowed it down. “I didn’t say you didn’t see Peter,” he said. “Let’s just save it for morning and talk to Dumbledore about it, alright?” Miles and miles overhead an airplane sliced a cicada-hum through the night clouds; on the television the newscaster was talking about the weather, worrying about the forests catching fire like desert chaparral. “There’s plenty of you left.”

Remus sort of scoffed and grabbed the ointment one of the Aurors had given him off the end table, throwing his big t-shirt in a rough heap to the foot of the bed and not waiting for Sirius to help him like he had that afternoon in the bathroom when they’d gotten back in from the sweltering horrorshow at the lake and their heads had stopped throbbing in splitting tandem with their hearts. “Here,” said Sirius, getting up and reaching for the tube, which Remus shoved at him without looking. As gently as he could he dabbed it into the vivid tearing faultline stretched from shoulderblade to shoulderblade, dittany and chamomile, heat and bitter silvery pain under his fingers. God, he was too thin, his spine and his shoulders and his rib-rungs arranged scultpurally and shifting jaggedly with his uneven breath, his scars known and unknown like a relief map conjured from pure wrenching memory. He smelled like fear and hurt and he moved like grief, heavy and rigid, bowed like a weeping willow.

“Dearly beloved sure as hell doesn’t love me anymore,” said Remus, his voice a thready rasp of dead leaves. Sirius pressed more of the ointment into the gash, careful to avoid any other part of him; his own skin felt wrong, tight and wrung-out, all the hairs on the back of his neck raising as if to static electricity. From Remus a confession like that was tantamount to begging: he’d never start talking himself but would instead slit some old unhealed wound open no matter how excruciating so someone else would ask him why he was bleeding, and he could pretend he was only answering the question.

It was also undercut by virtue of being the second time Remus had mentioned something along those lines in roughly the last twenty-four hours. The night before just after they’d checked in he’d told Sirius he had left because (in his own words) things weren’t working out with Dearborn, and he’d seemed deeply miffed that Sirius hadn’t asked him to elaborate, but he wasn’t sure he believed it. You weren’t likely to get an unedited story out of Remus these days, even less likely to get an honest one; more likely than not Dearborn had asked Remus to leave following yet another unexplained and unsorry disappearance, or after realizing in a wave of sudden existential clarity that he’d bitten off monumentally more than he could chew, or after spending most of a year unable to acclimate to Remus’s glacial presence in every room, at every table, at every touch. Punctuating all of this with the finality of a crushing and inky period was the arrival by owl of a parcel not an hour after their unconversation containing debris Remus had left at Dearborn’s flat—two shirts, a yellowed paperback, three socks, a box of Earl Grey bags, a few cassettes with cracked cases, the lavender soap he and Sirius both liked, a coffee mug, lotion, two bars of Muggle chocolate—and a very long letter Remus read at least three times in its entirety before he finally put it down and spent half an hour writing a response. 

He supposed the ultimate cosmic poetic justice would be if Dearborn had told Remus he wanted someone easier, someone untouched and unburdened who he could sink into like a key into a lock, but the thought of it needled at him all night with a kind of rabid and dizzying jealous fury as he laid awake staring at the water-stained ceiling. He could never stand the thought of anyone hurting Remus and had always tried to compensate for all the horror however he could, and yet it seemed that he himself had never learned to stop. Certainly he had done worse than most.

“I’m not surprised, if that’s what you’re trying to ask,” he said. Remus laughed once, painfully, his body hiccupping so sharply Sirius felt it in his own throat.

“Of course not. You’re probably dying to say you told me so.”

“I’m not dying to say anything to you.” For the first time it felt like it might be true. Beneath his hand Remus trembled almost imperceptibly like an exposed nerve, freezing, yearning; Sirius put his fingertips to the tapering wedge of the wound and then got up to wash his hands in bathroom. “Do the woods outside town suit you well enough for tomorrow night? Otherwise there’s a warehouse Dumbledore offered.”

“That’s fine,” said Remus. He still had not moved. “Woods would be a change. I always—it was an old barn, for the last year.”

“I suppose he stayed with you just outside?” Part of him understood that this was petty and cruel, but a larger part of him felt justified in all of it as Remus was the one who brought it up. Dearborn couldn’t have become an animagus if he’d tried for his entire insufferable jumped-up life.

“No. I don’t really know what he did. He always showed up an hour later than he needed to the morning after.”

This also didn’t surprise Sirius. Outside the window a dense fog had blown in on the infrequent wind, unscrolling slowly and blurring the market stalls down the road and the distant coalstone cursive of the hills. “I’m sorry,” he said.

“I keep letting—I keep putting up with shit I shouldn’t. And I keep getting fucking burned every single time.”

“You put up with a lot of shit you shouldn’t when you love someone.”

“Not like I’d know.”

“Why’s that?”

“I’ve never been in love with anyone,” said Remus, and this time Sirius saw him glance over at him from under his brow, waiting for it to hit. “Not once.”

Either he was being honest to the point of cruelty or he was trying to goad Sirius; likely it was both. Even on that infernal and soul-rending humiliating night in the flat when he came home from Brighton Remus had not said this to him, although in the starved and seemingly endless months that followed—each day measured in loss, six weeks since Remus left him, a month since Sirius last spoke to him, a teaspoon of residual fear when he woke to an empty bed, a yard of habitual expectation every time he walked through the door, half a year since he knew this would be always—Sirius had come to suspect it with a kind of unshocked and bludgeoning shame, but now he felt it fall through him like venom seizing his insides, too tired and too sad and too fucking royally doomed to take the bait. Instead he sat down at the foot of his bed and finished his beer.

Sort of defensively he kept his back to Remus, feeling his bones and his skin settle as if collapsing into himself and wishing with rancor that he would just take one of his werewolf sedatives and go to sleep, though his charged silence and the clear vulnerable crosshair-shot of the back of his head were probably as satisfying to Remus as any argument would’ve been. Anger sparked with a palpitating bolt and then subsided, numbness sucking like an eddy. It made sense. It had always made sense, he just couldn’t see it, or he wouldn’t.

The thing about both of them that they had in common even before their possession by different masters like souls already with one foot in hell was the same festering unloved emptiness—the dizzying, gaping, begging screaming crying thing inside them that wanted so recklessly to be loved, that would do anything for it, that would split itself open for it and bend its knees and bow its head and hold out its hands for it, pleading, like vessels waiting to be filled to the shuddering brim. But where Sirius would gorge himself until he was sick with it and his insides were vomiting out in kind of a liquefied and toxic ecstasy, Remus never wanted to get his own hands dirty. Remus never budged, Remus never gave, Remus never asked for anything or even expected it. Worse than anything else he wanted to BE loved but he didn’t want TO love: Sirius could have opened every vein and bled himself dry drop by drop and still it would not have been enough.

For nearly three months after that night in October Sirius had played _Marquee Moon_ on ceaseless and inexorable loop with little variation in between flipping the sides over while he sat on the couch possessed by his own spiritual languishing and/or so stoned he could feel every pulsing organ in his body, coming back with Promethean inevitability to “Venus,” swearing he could feel his liver twinge with a sharp arrhythmic pang that spread through every chamber of his heart: _I fell right into the arms of Venus de Milo_... It sounded lovely if you didn’t know the Venus de Milo had no arms. You could throw yourself at her for a masochistic eternity, spend your life prostrate before her, anoint her with your own blood in prayer, and it wouldn’t make a fucking bit of difference. Quicker and easier to bash your brains out on her marble feet and be done with it, which in the bright sunshine of retrospect would probably have been the kinder thing to do.

“You’re not missing much,” Sirius said when he found his voice again, rifling through his jeans for his cigarettes; when he found them he didn’t offer one to Remus. What he really wanted to say was, Are you even capable of truly loving someone in a way that isn’t motivated purely by self-interest, and have you ever noticed that you make a beggar out of everyone who has ever called you a friend, and do you even care, but he got up to shut the curtains and throw away their trash before it could come fuming and spitting out. “It’s never what you think it is and anyway I doubt it’d be what you wanted. About half the time I think it’s like this neurochemical parlor trick or a disease you just have to ride out.”

From behind him Remus made some kind of breathy, unbelieving noise in his throat. “That’s not what you used to say.”

“Maybe you can try your luck at a nice, easy man again and prove me wrong.”

“You’ve always been—you’re so fucking _arrogant_. Your feelings were always too much, everything about you is too much, they were the biggest and the truest and you never understood why you should have to sacrifice anything at the expense of them.”

“Yes, but _yours_ were the only ones that ever mattered. No one in the entire miserable fucking world has ever suffered like you’ve suffered or been hurt or sad or lost or wanted something they couldn’t have. Just you and your emotional solipsism. It’s all so easy for the rest of us.” The cigarette tasted suddenly like ashy graveyard dirt and he stubbed it out in the ashtray on the end table, which was when he noticed Remus staring at him, his knees bent up slightly on the bed and his face open, overflowing; he looked very young, or very old, pale and bereft, and a flood of hot anger crested inside him like a matchflare, the urge to hurt something else like he hurt firing across every synapse, choking, enough to bring the building down around them with magic in pure viscous unfocused rage. “The only reason you even brought this up Remus is because you’re sad and afraid and alone and you want to feel like someone loves you again without it costing you anything. As if I don’t feel the same—as if most of us don’t. The best thing you can do is get used to it because it’s not going anywhere and I can’t make it better.”

“Do you still,” Remus asked. Whether he couldn’t finish or simply wouldn’t, Sirius couldn’t tell.

“You forfeited any right to ask me that when you spent last fall with Caradoc Dearborn’s cock in your mouth. Don’t—you don’t get to fucking do this. Not now.”

“Christ. You’re so fucking vile. As if being a better lay is the only reason I left you when you know the extent of it.”

“Can you not, with the philosophizing and what-all about it like you didn’t already throw it all in my face a year ago. Find another sounding board. You never seem to have any trouble with that.”

“I wasn’t trying,” said Remus, dragging a hand through his hair, “I can’t, I don’t even know what I’m supposed to do with this anymore. With myself or with you or with any of it.”

“That’s not my fault or my problem,” said Sirius, echoing. He could hear it in the walls and on the greenblue summer air where it hung, wishing halfheartedly with a kind of exhausted might that he could swallow it whole again.

All the fight seemed to have gone out of Remus and instead he was watching Sirius the way he might have watched an animal throwing itself against a cage, something illegible on his face, unthreaded and helpless. There was a pinch of something twisting the corner of his mouth that could’ve been regret if Sirius still knew how to read him, but he’d never known Remus to truly regret anything profoundly enough to let it show; all this time he’d thought it was just the heat but he was realizing that everything seemed dimmer, the color sapped, the room rimmed with an opaque cataract glow. So long ago the world was rendered in vivid and blinding ice-water shocks of blues and reds and yellows, all of it centered on Remus and their flat and everything they could make between them. How much of it had ever been real?

“What happened to you?” asked Remus, with the kind of voice he’d use at a bomb site or a sacrificial altar. Like they had never met—like Sirius’s skin had finally been peeled entirely off the rotten and fermented fruit and now he could not look away from the grotesque, petrifying hell that was his ruined soul breathing underneath. Look fucking well, he wanted to scream, this is what you consigned yourself to all those years ago whether you ever knew it or not. This is what you were sleeping with and eating with and talking to and taking from and coming home to and fucking and holding and hating and wanting—this is the covenant you made gasping in the dark, this is your calcified error, this is what you can’t take back, this is everything you can’t unmake. Did you expect me to be other than what I was?

“I wouldn’t know what to tell you,” he said.

Remus shook his head almost imperceptibly, his wary, uncomprehending stare pinning Sirius like an insect onto corkboard. “What happened to you,” he repeated, like he was eulogizing him, “Sirius, what—just, all of you. Your sense of humor, your hopefulness, your fucking certainty about every stupid thing. Your love. All of it.”

“What happened to any of us,” he said. “Isn’t it the same?”

“Probably,” said Remus. “It’s like I don’t even know you.”

“An hour ago you were just telling me you didn’t think there was anything left of you.”

“Seeing you is—it’s different. Where did you go?”

What a fucking question. Where did you go, Sirius? Who even are you? Without Remus he had become someone else and he had never accounted for all the missing pieces or for how he would have to explain it to him someday, having assumed at the peak of his grandiose idiocy that Remus would always be there to mirror the changes, but at some point he had become lost even to himself. So many things beyond recall, so much eaten by worms, the bruise spreading through his innards, rotting like cancer. “It’s too early and I’m not going to be drunk enough for bedtime psychoanalysis,” he said, sighing into the breeze that scuttled like a mouse in the loose ceiling tiles. “You should try and get some sleep before tomorrow.”

“Would you stop trying to take care of me.”

“I’m not—alright. Whatever.” He got up to pee just as Remus was pushing the duvet down to go to sleep. Their eyes caught and Sirius felt something in his chest strike like a lit fuse and melt to molten and hissing red metal, rust crackling and grinding off machinery he scarcely remembered how to use.

Remus turned onto his side, tugging the stiff sheet around his shoulder where the curse-mark burst wreathed his shoulders, accusatory. “Turn the light off when you get back.”

“Sure,” said Sirius. _Goodnight_ , said his amnesiac brain.

Despite two ineffective cooling charms and losing his shirt he couldn’t sleep in the stale heat even after he pushed the starchy sheet down to his hips and settled instead for reading the same plodding section of _Howl_ he’d been trying to finish for weeks by wandlight; around midnight he heard a voice in the street below the disillusioned windows and got up to peer through the pinprick gap in the curtains, but he saw no one and heard nothing but the clank of a bad car engine lurching far off in the distance and the unhurried click of feet fading down the street, though he couldn’t make out another pair of footsteps. 

Again Remus’s insistence that he had seen Peter that afternoon snagged on tripwires in his mind, his head throbbing with the last tinges of his headache as he retraced the encryption layered on the wards they’d spelled around the room the night before like spun sugar. In the other bed Remus was snoring very softly the way he only ever did just before the full moon, namely after he’d taken one of his sedatives, which towards the end of things last year he’d done more often than not; in the halcyon before, when things were better between them, Sirius would rub his shoulders and his back for hours or run baths for both of them with the lights out and candles lit and a record playing in the living room, which devolved into scattershot snapshots of mouths and hands and fingers and a certain pitch of breath leading inevitably back to the bedroom, where they would have slow, intense sex, sometimes three times in a row, not bothering to put on clothes for the rest of the day. Since then more than a year had passed in death and doubt and dread. How could he trust Remus when chief among all other things he couldn’t trust himself, when Remus was inside him, when Remus had infiltrated him like the war itself, like his brother, like pocket lint, like blood, like history, like all the other stains that would never wash out.

Later he wouldn’t remember what time he fell asleep—the last thing he remembered before the blank blackness of the dreaming cracked over him like an egg yolk was hoping he’d turned off the coffee maker at the flat before they’d left. Snatched figments of funhouse-mirror distortions blared across his dreams in submarinean reds of smoke and tea-whistles and seaweed and ultraviolet whispers, the smell of burnt bacon, a blue, protracted yearning, teeth in thick black matted fur; at one point he was floating in the sea like a buoy, tracing the waves like unwritten music, and then he was in the front parlor of Number Twelve, his father advancing and then cornering him in towering splenetic rage, and Regulus on the leather armchair by the window, moaning. Bleeding, Sirius realized—someone had ripped stitches out of him and the blood was draining from the insides of his arms and down his sternum to his navel, percolating on the floor, the skin and the ribs split in a fissure down the middle showing his heart and lungs and coiled guts where Sirius could see all the things that had been done to him, and all the things he had done—he struggled rabidly, screaming something, but it barely made a sound, and someone was crushing his arms behind his back, forcing him to watch, and then the swarming thing in his ears seized him.

Voices whirled around him in bright carnival swirls but he never saw anyone’s face as he wandered over the hill and into the sunset forest, where he understood that he was going to lie down and die. Something was buried here; something had been done here. Impossibly he took a step and the earth heaved forward in a hundred patchwork miles to the craggy limestone swallow of a cave, its mouth refracting on the surface of a lake where something moved, just skimming the surface of the water. When he stepped closer he saw that they were hands. Hands and teeth, alive as worms, writhing at the scent of blood. He turned around to run but something nipped at his heels, plucking at the ground and the sky and up his spine like he was being reeled in on fishing line from a deep ocean trench, his body rippling, fingers picking delicately at the sutures between layers of the dreaming, jangling across his tongue and the wavering sky in a chord of bitter blue nightshade.

Oneiromancy. Someone was inside him, climbing up his skull, searching. In a rhythmic jerk he walked forward to the edge of the water and caught a flash of something behind him reflected on the muddy edge, rippling on the wind; a shadow at the trees threw back its head and howled. Then oblivion roared in and he woke, gasping, with his sweaty hand clamped around his own arm.

The neon display on the alarm clock between beds read 02:27. His heart was slamming so hard he could feel it in his ribs and was sure the nightmare-knocking of it like someone at the door would wake Remus, but Remus was breathing very deeply on the other bed in blessed drugged untroubled sleep. Through the needle-gap in the curtains the moon stretched its brimming eye as if testing, skewing the shadows of their scattered things on the wall like a still life vanitas; the only things he could hear were bush crickets and owlcalls and his own fractured breathing, the fitted bedsheet drenched with nightmare sweat and the cheap mid-century pastoral on the far wall sheathed in black, his hand tapping his throat where his stuttering heart would not be swallowed back down into his chest. He got up, lightheaded and unsteady, and went to the bathroom with his ears still ringing with flooding horror.

Squinting under the shrill fluorescent light he sat on the edge of the bathtub until his heartbeat had stopped hammering through his limbs in dizzying jackknife-shocks and drank about a gallon of very cold water. In the mirror his dark hair was tangled like spilled ink, damp at the hairline, his eyes huge and red with unslept purpling circles underneath, his face deathly pale, his chest still panting slightly in the dip between his collarbones, looking like he’d run from a ghost, or perhaps he was one; his mouth and lips were dry but he’d bitten through his cheek at some point and tasted blood. He knew that he should wake Remus but his head was full of broken glass and quicksand, his heart still ringing through every juddering vein. What happened to you, he thought at his reflection, whatever happened to you when you weren’t looking.

In the scheme of things oneiromancy was distinct from yet not dissimilar to legilimency: both required the penetration of a target’s mind via difficult and potent magic, but where legilimency was given the credence and weighty academic prestige of Real Magic with all the bells and whistles and university courses that accompanied such lofty and male-dominated fields, oneiromancy—with its roots historically in divination—was chronically understudied, underfunded, and rarely taken as seriously. Because of the tenuous, delusive nature of dreamspace it was notoriously imprecise, but where legilimency only allowed for very brief, crystalline flashes of thought subsuming thought subsuming spiderwebbed thought, you could take your time with oneiromancy. Useful information could be mined and carefully extracted though it took longer and often required assistance of an illicit nature e.g. psychoactive potions, mushrooms, hallucinogenic frogs, peyote, et cetera to sift through the annals of someone else’s subconscious for long enough to locate the necessary juicy tidbits; the risk of the target waking either naturally or after an ungentle magical trepanning of their dreams was also discouragingly high.

Thus it was generally put to other purposes, typically via various forms of dream-scrying and divinatory procedures, but it was always most successful among two people who knew each other well and as such were willing participants—less an invasion or the turning of a door into someone else and more a merging or a soldering into the same nocturnal creature. He and Remus had begun experimenting with it near the end of their seventh year following an unfortunate string of frustrations after Filch convinced Dumbledore to lengthen the prefects’ rounds at night and James and Peter began taking their studies more seriously to try and score some last-minute NEWTs, which meant they hardly had a second alone before the door to the dorm was unceremoniously thrown open again and Sirius had to pretend he’d dropped his wand down Remus’s pants or had just lost a high-stakes game of cards involving his stash of weed and also his cock; that spring they’d taken James’s invisibility cloak without asking and stolen a copy of _The Dream Oracle: from Pleasure to Practicality_ from the library, casting the porous nets of their dreaming as far as they would go every night until after two weeks of unrestful roving they found each other and woke with damp sheets and a lingering, marvelous looseness in every elastic sinew. By the end of that summer after graduation they were likely the world’s foremost experts on sexual somnambulism.

They’d become infinitely more practiced at projecting over distances when Dumbledore started sending Sirius on reconnaissance missions in fall of ‘78, falling asleep on hotel beds in Leeds or Stornoway with his head open for Remus as he wandered the spectral earthworks of the dreaming until they found each other. It was never the same as the real thing and much of it dissipated upon waking, but there was an impossible and sometimes terrifying spiritual intimacy that involved allowing someone else quite literally inside your head to see your ugliest memories, your seething fears, your music, your promises, your unspeakable hopes, your fucked, devouring, holy love, every individual component of you flayed and unknotted, lit up like a string of lights: all the elemental and metaphysical nakedness of sex with none of the physicality. He laid down with Remus in the tall grass on the Lupin property where the apple trees grew, in the empty dormitory, on the sandy midnight palm of a beach that resembled Minehead. Entire worlds borne between them of obscure magic wholly because there was a time in their lives when they could not bear to be apart.

After one of them came home from whatever horrorshow they’d been sent to partake of they sometimes tried things they had to that point only attempted in dreams, with wildly varying results. In the middle of the night they woke each other to make love, his hands squeezing Remus’s ass as he slid his boxers down and drug his mouth over the insides of his thighs until Remus was half-hard, his eyes crescents under the fan of his lashes, watching as Sirius licked slow ribbons around his cock and then flicked his tongue into the slit before he took the tip into his mouth, blood-heavy and hot, sucking very slowly and moving only his lips in hypnotic tidal flux until he wrapped a hand around Remus’s hips and tightened so he’d fuck his mouth. Other times he’d wake up with Remus’s mouth on him under the blanket or his hard cock pressed to his hip or his ass, his hand tracing Sirius’s cock in his boxers until he turned over and pulled Remus into his lap or covered him the way he liked, thrusting against each other until Remus was making breathy staccato noises— _oh-oh-fuck_ —as he got close, which was when Sirius would reach down and jerk them together or fuck Remus’s thighs right where their cocks aligned until they came.

Crystal and clear as glass and longing he could remember being inside Remus few times after they’d just pulled each other out of a dream, coming so hard when Remus clenched deliberately around him that it felt like he was being driven from his own body and then getting half-hard again when Remus came. The clutch of his body and his hands and his heartbeat slamming against Sirius’s, coaxing like a command, insatiable, indelible. Back then there had been a lot of sleepy talking and a lot of laughing; they had always liked to make each other laugh in bed. Mornings they left inflammatory erotic epistolary in coat pockets and under coffee cups and between the pages of books on the table and talked hilariously about getting a telephone to add another scintillating dimension to their sexual repertoire, but they never got around to it.

Remembering made him feel sick and yet he could think of no other time in his life when he had even suspected that someone else was peering into his dreams to uncertain ends: he was too attuned to the texture and the senseless greenspace of his dreaming not to notice any prodding at once. None other than Remus had ever tried. And whoever it was had known his mind well enough to transmit an image—well enough to scalpel at the pain.

Sometime after three he went back to bed and slept in anxious fragments, waking up every half hour until just after sunrise when he got dressed and went into the lobby for a copy of the local newspaper and then wrote Dumbledore; if he dreamed at all he didn’t remember it other than insubstantial slivers of sound—once he thought heard a car door slamming shut, near dawn a man’s voice saying, strangely, _What’s the time?_ —and Remus didn’t even stir until eight and took another forty-five minutes to get out of bed, groggy and exhausted as if he hadn’t slept at all, holding all his pieces very tightly in a fist. All day Remus was restless, pacing slightly in front of the windows before they left to get breakfast from the café and wiping his sweaty hands on his jeans repeatedly behind Sirius on the motorbike as they drove to the standing stones with a bag of strawberry bread Remus wouldn’t eat and enormous coffees that scalded their throats in the low throb of the morning heat, never quite meeting Sirius’s eyes, his fingers drumming against his thigh. He could no longer feel even a sliver of Regulus in the dry dust-caked wrinkles of the ground and found surprisingly that instead of disappointment or grief a snare of hollow, vindictive gladness curled up in its place: he wasn’t sure he wanted to share this with Remus, and he wasn’t sure what Remus would do with it.

At noon they got back on the motorbike and stopped by a restaurant for fish and chips to take back to the hotel; Sirius only bought one styrofoam box to share with Remus because he wasn’t very hungry and Remus was intermittently nauseous, immediately settling on a peach instead and chewing very slowly in the strangling heat. For an hour he read the same few lines of a Yeats poem from the miniature hardback he took with him everywhere while Remus tried futilely to sleep until they left again in the motionless and buzzing midafternoon, Remus’s ragged fingernails gripping his waist on the bike all the way to the lake where they searched uselessly for almost an hour before settling in by the shore to try and skip stones, or Sirius did. Remus seemed to be aware that Sirius was watching him, his eyes sliding off to the sides and his shoulders very rigid, like he was being followed, or hunted. Occasionally he had wondered but had never asked if these few hours before moonrise were the most Remus ever was—all of him as close to the surface as it ever got, like watching the ingredients in a potion all reach their boiling point and coalesce into one unified inextricable mass before it was overtaken by the change. An unbearable and transformative gestalt. He could have told anyone about the color of Remus’s hair or how he took his tea or the way he sometimes talked in his sleep, the pitch of his laughter, the way he smiled when Sirius sang or whistled while he cooked or washed dishes, which scars would make him jolt like he’d been electrocuted when touched, the vein-roots threading his thin hipbones, his favorite memories and the things that would always make him laugh without fail no matter how sad or angry or scared he was and his habit of eating peanut butter with a spoon right out of the jar, but he could not have said how Remus felt right now standing at the edge of the water, waiting.

“James always wanted to live up here,” said Sirius, purely because the insect-song was needling at his nerves, making him grind his teeth. Smoke rolled in from somewhere maybe a mile or two off, woodsy and vaguely sulphurous; Remus turned only his head to look at him like a bird of prey. “He had this farm-boy fantasy about taking Lily to live by a tarn and keep chickens like he’d ever cooked his own meals or gotten up before ten a day in his life if he could help it.”

“He told me that once,” said Remus. “I think it was in the same letter where he was waxing uncomfortably poetic about seeing Marlene in a bikini. Talk about whiplash.”

“That’s because James spent the entirety of that summer with his dick in his hand,” said Sirius. It got a laugh out of Remus, who seemed startled at the sound. “If we—I think I’d move to Cornwall, maybe, or the Hebrides. If I made it out of this.”

Remus was staring intently at a ripple where a fish had just eaten something off the surface. “I don’t know anymore,” he said. “No matter where I go there’s still—it would be still.”

He didn’t clarify. Likely he knew he didn’t need to. “To tell you the truth I never pictured you staying in London.”

“I don’t really want to. It just reminds me constantly of things I don’t have, or things I used to. Of being alone.”

“Everywhere’s lonely.”

“I’ve never felt more alone in my life than I do around you,” said Remus. “Speaking of James—the last time I really talked to him, months ago, he said he always thought it’d be you who ruined everything so he was surprised when it was me. Like he’d never thought about it further than that. I’m amazed he never really picked sides. Until now, of course.”

“No. I suppose it was more of a joint effort.”

“I don’t feel sorry for you,” said Remus.

“You never did get tired of being a martyr,” said Sirius, skipping another stone across the lake, “most especially when you’re not.”

“All you’ve ever done is blame anyone but yourself. You can’t even stand like a fraction of the guilt so you just forget you ever had any part of it and then do anything to make yourself feel better, it’s ugly to watch. Ever since you were a kid you’ve been that way and you’ll never change.”

“Jesus, you love listening to yourself. Go ahead and hide it all til morning, I can fucking wait.”

“Can we not do this right now,” said Remus, rubbing his eye, as if he hadn’t started it. “It feels like something’s crawling up my spine.”

“We can go back if you’d like. I’ll get you something to drink.”

“Here is fine,” said Remus, “the water’s nice. It’s quieter.” Which was a roundabout way of saying, please shut up and nevermind that we started something we don’t want to finish.

Far above something cast a quick, soaring shadow between them and they both jumped before they realized it was an owl, one of the tawny, nondescript Hogwarts owls, telling them before it even landed that the letter would bear ill tidings from Dumbledore. When it swooped low and dropped its letter into Remus’s lap they saw that it wasn’t a letter but the front page of the _Daily Prophet_ , creased starkly so that the relevant article and curlicue ink-marks on the page showed below the enormous blocky _BREAKING NEWS!!!_ marquee above the headline: _Bodies found in Ormskirk, foul play confirmed_. The writer had buried the lede probably without even realizing they had done it:

> _Three bodies were found Friday afternoon near railroad tracks about five miles from the Ormskirk railway station, said a representative from the Department of Magical Law Enforcement (DMLE)._
> 
> _Thurston Dodderidge, 73, and his wife, Regine Dodderidge, 75, were found partially covered by dead leaves and twigs in a wooded area just outside town after a pedestrian noticed an unusual odor and contacted authorities. The third body, a Muggle man of unknown name and age, was found in the same state._
> 
> _“At this time we do know that they were all three killed with magic, though exactly what and how will take a few days to tell,” said Glynnis Midgen, Deputy Superintendent of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement Patrol (DMLE-P). “We would like to extend our deepest condolences to the family in this time of tragedy, and also ask that anyone with information please come forward. As always we are offering a five hundred galleon reward for any tips.”_
> 
> _The Dodderidges were reported missing on 19 July by their daughter, Gwen Fairewake of Shropshire, after she found their house at 22 Croftson Ave. deserted. The couple was known in the local Magical community as antique collectors of both Magical and Muggle artifacts, with a particular emphasis on Magically-enhanced Muggle objects, and had kept a shop on St. Helens Rd. for thirty-two years. Somewhat controversially the shop was open to both the Magical and Muggle communities, with certain rooms and objects disillusioned in accordance with international Wizarding laws._
> 
> _The Muggle man found alongside the Dodderidges could not be identified. According to Midgen his face had been badly disfigured and he was missing any identifying information of the nature Muggles normally carry, and his shoes and shirt appeared to have been taken. The DMLE-P also believe that his head was shaved after the murder in a further attempt to conceal._
> 
> _Midgen stressed that no group has claimed responsibility for the murders, and that certain circumstances of the killings were atypical of You-Know-Who’s activity. She said there is no reason whatsoever to panic and called for order in the Ormskirk community._
> 
> _“We cannot be certain whether these people were all murdered at the same time, or for that matter why,” Midgen said. “This could be a case of someone being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Speculation gets us nowhere. But times being what they are, we won’t rule anything out.”_
> 
> _A statement from the Ministry, including a sketch of the Muggle man, is expected on Monday._

Dumbledore had underlined certain passages in red ink twice or sometimes thrice as if Sirius was too fucking stupid to see what was screaming in his face. In his head something would not stop ringing like the whistling of klaxons or bombs but as he tried to get his breathing under control he realized it was his blood rushing like a funeral shroud through his ears and down his throat to his spine and his toes, his hands shaking, cold sweat breaking over his brow; he felt like someone had just summoned every internal organ through his navel with their wand and left him scraped hollow until it was replaced with a spreading and tinny fluorescent numbness. When he sat down and looked out into the rheumy blue sky over the lake he had the sensation that he’d just fallen from a great height or woken up before he realized it was the feeling of knowing he was alive when his brother would never be alive again—when these people would never be alive again. The sheer electrifying absurdity of knowing that he would live, that he would eat and sleep and dream and fuck and wake up and mourn and feel sorry for himself and breathe and hear new songs and find grey hairs and feel his body pulsing and yearning and hurting and his blood moving in currents like words through his heart when Regulus would not, almost obliterated everything else.

“So why was your brother killing people in Ormskirk,” said Remus. He was looking at Sirius strangely, stunned and wary, like he was a dog that might be rabid.

“You think I have any more idea than you?”

“He was _your_ brother. Ormskirk was—Kingsley saw him near there. He couldn’t remember the date but he said it was mid-July, remember?”

“Are you going to blame me for _this_ , too?” he asked, half-laughing over the whistling in his ears, vaguely but vengefully satisfied by Remus’s frown. The last place any Order members or adjacents had seen Regulus before pieces of him started washing up in the Leven was outside a pureblood gala in Oxford only a day after the article said the Dodderidges’ daughter had reported her parents missing, but just before that Kingsley Shacklebolt had seen him in Lathom on a trip to an apothecary, dressed all in black and looking haughty and high-flown about something. All of it aligned in star-bright shrapnel-scattered constellations as he supposed he’d always known it would. “We’ll be fucking lucky if we ever know because the assholes at the DMLE got to it before any of us could.”

“Kingsley would do us a favor if we asked,” said Remus. “If he could get clearance.”

“He won’t get it,” said Sirius. “Not an auror on probation, not for this, not in time. I’m not sure it even matters.”

Remus took a breath. “Obviously he needed something from these people.”

“Either they had something or they knew something. He would’ve used the Muggle’s hair for polyjuice, probably while he was dealing with them, that’s like, that couldn’t be more obvious.”

“Tell that to the fucking DMLE’s finest,” said Remus. “What do you think he got out of the guy we found yesterday? Same kind of thing?”

“Something about that feels different,” said Sirius, his voice rasping painfully in his chest. “I don’t know. Like whoever that was they were his last stop before he went off to do whatever he did and washed up on the riverbank in pieces. If I had to guess I’d say Regulus was using his wand, and maybe putting his teeth in polyjuice too. Christ.” Dizzy with the heat and his heart he covered his mouth.

“Everything about that felt, I don’t know. Weirdly personal.” 

“I know.” He sighed or sobbed or both. “Whatever he told him—I don’t know. The spell I felt at the stones yesterday felt fainter. He had to’ve killed that guy sometime after he was done there.”

Remus fixed him with his eyes and then looked away again, out towards the far shore on the other side of the lake where a heron took flight; it was nearing sunset, the low clouds starting to catch on the afternoon greylight, like the earth was holding in its breath. “Hard to understand why your brother would be murdering Muggles and Muggleborns—and they probably were, the _Prophet_ ’s not exactly known for its subtlety—if he’d turned on his master.”

“Not wanting to see Voldemort take over and rape and pillage and burn and slaughter everything isn’t necessarily the same thing as actually having any fucking abiding love for Muggleborns, or what happens to part-humans. You know that.”

“You would too,” said Remus. It could have meant any scathing number of things but Sirius didn’t press him. “Has he ever, do you think Voldemort would have pushed him out of the fold? The way purebloods love to do with blood traitors.”

“I think we’d have heard something about that by now. You know how they love to gloat about their evil shit.”

His fingernails were bleeding because he’d been chewing them without realizing again, red velvet halfmoon stains in his nail beds. “Greyback does that,” said Remus. When Sirius looked up he was still staring across the lake. “Usually when someone doesn’t agree with his methods, or challenges him in like any way at all, or sometimes just because he finds them threatening, I think. Of course they don’t just get to leave. He likes to make examples of them. That’s why, you know—he takes souvenirs, like I told you.”

“Learning from Voldemort, or is that a hobby he developed on his own?”

“He likes to think Voldemort got the idea from him, as if Greyback’s ever had that kind of influence over him. But maybe he did, I don’t know.” Very softly the wind rattled the dry leaves and Remus’s nostrils flared with his breath, sharp and pained. “In the end he’s nothing but a dog to be culled eventually but he’s always had these delusions of grandeur. And he is clever. More than Voldemort or anyone maybe understand.”

“Sometimes I wonder if Dumbledore doesn’t also underestimate him for the obvious reasons.”

“He does,” said Remus, not even a breath of hesitation, “everyone does. And I hope you haven’t got it in your head that the old man would ever let you or me go without unholy retribution—this is forever, for as long as we live. We are the war. We’ll never get out of it.”

“Do you ever feel like this is all, I don’t know, orchestrated? I mean it feels like being moved by some invisible hand sometimes going all the way back to when we were kids, like this was all decided and the only thing we can do is live out the choices we have left, if those are even choices at all.”

“I forget you take the whole spiritus mundi multiverse thing very seriously.”

“I’m not sure I believe there’s anything else but this,” he said. “That it wasn’t all a foregone conclusion before it even started. With a few detours I guess.”

“For a while now I’ve wondered if at some point I didn’t exchange one master for the other,” said Remus. “And that you didn’t, too. And to what end.”

Are we still talking about Dumbledore and Greyback and this final inescapable sickness in my blood, he wanted to ask. “You’ve been back to him since last year,” he said. It wasn’t a question; it hardly even needed to be said.

“No one will ever—you cannot know how much I hate him,” said Remus, “and yet there’s this, part of me wants it. Pieces of it. And I wonder if he doesn’t have the right of it when I’m around him, when it gets into my head. Looking at him I wonder if I should stop trying to be a human being.”

“And that if he can do these things,” said Sirius, “that if this is in you, then what does it say about you? If he could do this then what could you do?”

When Remus turned around Sirius was already looking at him waiting to meet his eyes and didn’t bother pretending he hadn’t been, that he didn’t want to see Remus’s eyes wide and moon-yellow on him again, his mouth just open, Sirius’s anticipatory breath jagged and bitter, everything sinking as it had been for so long down down one drain or another. Just one more time, he was thinking. Soon it’ll all be gone. Just one second—just feel it split like an atom bomb. Just look at me. “Yes,” Remus said. “Sirius.”

Names had a kind of magic depending on who said them and how; Remus could have used _cruciatus_ on him right now or kissed him or fucked him or slit open his belly to take out his guts and he wouldn’t have cared. There was compulsion in a name, history, violence, power finer than any trigger or any spell: he would have gone under _imperius_ for Remus if he’d only asked, if he’d ever wanted to. “Last night I had, um, I had a dream,” he said. “I think you should know.”

“Alright,” said Remus. Almost audibly Sirius could hear him bracing, dropping his center of gravity, watching for the blow.

“It was, I don’t know where I was or if it was even real, or could be real. A lake somewhere, full of bodies, or body parts. There was a cave on the other side but I couldn’t—someone else was in there.” Already he had sweat through the back of his shirt and couldn’t entirely blame the heat. “In my dream, I mean. I could feel it. They were looking for something.”

The look on Remus’s face was implacable: livid and betrayed and exquisitely, torturously pained. “You mean oneiromancy,” he said, like razorblades.

“I have no idea what they wanted. I woke up not long after I felt it and I caught like, the barest glimpse of something. But I can’t say who or what it was, or what they were looking for.”

“Well if I had to guess I’d say they were trying to pull something out of you or lure you somewhere, or both. Which would work perfectly because you’re just fucking reckless and suicidal and paranoid enough to do it.” Disconcertingly Remus had still not stopped staring at him with his body curved in a looming gestural arc that suggested hatred distilled absolute and poisonous, and so help him Sirius thought that at last—in pain, in severing fear—they understood each other. “Have you been—are you _lying_ to me?”

“Why in the fuck would I lie about this?” He was on his feet, both of them like animals bedding each other down. Often when they were together, or simply when they were in the volcanic and immortal clutch of teenagerdom, the moon would bleach out their fights in the night and they would wake in the morning bone-bruised and loopy with unsleeping and lead each other back to the Shrieking Shack or apparate back to the flat, picking flaked blood out from their nails and shallow teeth-wounds and fall asleep naked with the dawnlight echoing up and down their bodies, touching and not touching. They never apologized. Now they never would again. “Have you been listening to a single fucking thing I’ve been saying? Why would I be _telling_ you any of—”

“What I’d like to know is why the hell you didn’t wake me up,” Remus said over him, very loudly. “You let someone in your head, you let them see God knows what in your dreams and you’re only just—”

“Fuck you. I didn’t _let_ anyone do anything any more than you’d _let_ someone take a fucking hammer to your skull or perform legilimency on you when you’re not paying attention.”

“No, no more than you’ve ever enjoyed playing with fire.”

“No more than you can help striking the goddamn match.”

“Are you going to explain yourself or are you just going to keep having a tantrum?” asked Remus. His shoulders and his hands were shaking slightly and his hair was wild where he’d pulled at it, like something undead just unborn and come fully-formed out of the lake. “Because Sirius I can’t trust anything you tell me until I know why. Maybe not even then.”

“When did you ever start?”

“Ask yourself why,” Remus spat. “Again: fucking explain yourself.”

There was bile in his throat and he could taste blood and smell it, the sun red in the sky, red in his mouth. A flare of fear unfurled in his belly, the strange mangled cacophony of August slurring its gospel through the trees in a strangling fever-pitch such that he could hardly breathe. “I thought. I don’t know. You’re the only one who’s ever,” he said, “no one else has ever even tried. So at first I thought, maybe it was you.”

“So you thought, what, I was looking through your inept cracked-up quagmire of a brain for scraps to give my _master_? I can’t believe, with everything else going on—”

“Remus—”

“Or is it because you’re actually so, you’re really truly self-centered enough to think I’d still want to see your dreams.” Venom and teeth, digging into the old—oldest—wound. “Like I’ve wanted anything to do with you or your fucking dreams for more than a year. Is that right? Have you got it in your head that I’m secretly deeply in love with you and just waiting for you to make a move so I can fall into your arms all over again like I don’t know better—like I’d want to. Because I don’t. I left because I didn’t want it. And this is it” —he shoved his arms out, encompassing the impossible chasm of himself, or maybe both of them— “this is all there is. There’s nothing left here. Not for you or anyone.”

“Do you hear me asking for it, you fuck?”

“You can’t let it go,” said Remus, “it’s been nearly a year and you just cannot fucking find it in you to let it go that I left you for someone else. I fucked around on you and I should’ve left you sooner than I did but I didn’t and I can’t change that now. And I’m not, I’m never coming back, and I’m not waiting for you to come take me home. Since apparently you need to hear these things before it’ll sink in and you’ll put anything up to and including this goddamn endless fucking war we are losing above yourself.”

The worst part of their fights was always that Remus liked to let his cruelty simmer where Sirius would crack himself open and have done with it; Remus always liked to suck the juice out of his pain until it was honed to a lethal knifepoint, waiting for an exposed belly, a throat to tear, and as was usually the case between them none of what he’d said was untrue. Watching Remus a few paces away holding himself very still like he’d just been burnt Sirius thought his face made less and less sense, abstracting, oblique like a photograph warped by water or a flower browned and wilted in the afternoon sun, the way his own body sometimes felt when he lost sight of it under the weight of the grief and the fear and the waiting-for and the sucking black-hole guilt: a stranger looking at him out of eyes he had never seen before. Inside him everything congealed into a corrosive acid hurt like basalt or tar, all his pain, his hate and his fear and his magic and his rage and his regrets and his hopes and his shame and his stupid humiliating screaming sopping holy love compressing, pressing it down deep into the cradle of his body like a pearl. The remainder of his self, he supposed, as whole as it would ever be again.

“I already wrote to Dumbledore,” he said. Remus would have waited for Sirius to ask, if it were him, if he were still pretending whatever ersatz loyalty they still owed each other could be salvaged; he would have waited for the worst to happen. At this point Sirius decided it would feel better to break something on his own. “Before you ask.”

Laughter, dry as the merciless drought and unshocked. “That’s what I thought,” said Remus. “Take me to the fucking woods. I’m tired of waiting.”

“Do you want to stop by the—”

“I said I’m tired of waiting.”

Again they got on the motorbike and pulled onto the backroad leading to the wider highway into Keswick, uphill all the way and the blue evening air sticky with humidity, keyed-up, the wind shaking in the trees like the rafters of a very old attic, irresolute and uneasy; Remus wouldn’t touch him, his legs clamped tightly over the seat and the rear fender, looking over his shoulder occasionally as if he expected to find the moon risen already cold and watchful as an eye. At times when he would cross the lawn at Hogwarts with James and Peter or if he looked through the curtains or the veil of trees wherever he and Remus went together in the years after he would look up and think of a patronus, its ectoplasmic mouth overflowing with gold the way he thought his soul must look if he could see it or of Remus could, every ghostly filament lit up and shining in a kind of telepathic transmission between them. Yearning spilling always out of his mouth and his eyes. Love-blind and dearly wishful he’d thought he could feel it between them sometimes stretched like elastic or taffy, spread out centrifugal in a ley line to wherever they were, rubber-band vibrations resounding like the pulsebeat-shiver of another heart sliding up against his own, calling to him from anywhere. Their souls, soldered together in the hallowed green knot of the forest, sculpted from the same majestic clay.

Regulus must have been able to cast a patronus and Sirius wondered as he spun gravel under the stuttering tires and took a narrow road into the red sunset-shadows to the west what form it had taken. His love of rabbits and his fear of the dark and his eagerness to please, his teenage detachment from everything and everyone, most perplexing of all from himself—he could scarcely think of his brother as anything but a child, a child who never knew what he wanted or perhaps even had time to know himself, who cried at thunderstorms and raised voices, who fed his fish in their glass tank and talked to them dutifully every afternoon, who stitched himself to shadows, who laughed at students being humiliated in the hallways or at lunch, who sat at the same dinner table beside boys who’d thrown tentacula venom onto other students and hissed _cocksucker_ at Remus after class, who trailed after Sirius or their cousins or later Rosiers and Carrows and Malfoys and Snape looking blasé and intimidating, as if there was nothing better to do and no choice to make. Boredom bred disappointment bred resentment bred ravenous, moldering malice. Unbidden he remembered an article he’d read about an American who had jumped from a bridge and left behind a note that said _No reason at all except I have a toothache_ ; even then, three or four years ago, he’d gotten a sweeping visceral bone-chill when he read it and thought of Regulus. No reason at all except I don’t know where I’m going. No reason at all except I’m bored. No reason at all except I am so very very terribly tired.

He turned sharply off the road leading into the woods and onto a wood-chipped trail meant for walking, having whispered a silencing charm into the engine some miles ago. Here the air was somewhat cooler with the breeze fanning through the thickening branches as they climbed deeper into the arterial spill of the gloaming gathering its gold and greying breath, casting long expectant shadows across the ground in the tangled wilderness where the silence exuded a kind of enchanted deception: all these miles and all this time they had come together only to be marked for death. He could never remember feeling dread before moonrise the way he knew Remus did but he could feel it now, an exhausted, vacant resignation settling in, like watching stormclouds roll in over the astonished horizon; everything was ending. A shocking, disappointed peace. Sediment sinking to the bottom. Once you’d traveled to the spoiled and decomposing core there was nothing left but to be unmade or save your own rotten soul. The concept is more important than the context. Do you jump or do you fall?

When he pulled off the trail and down a hillside into the flat ivy-gnarled bank of a small stream he could hear nightbirds calling overhead, bearing up their sorrow; somewhere far in the distance a train whistle carried on the wind like a ghost made of sacred and invincible memory. Over the wind and the birdsong he could just barely hear the skinny bell-bright trickle of the water as he felt Remus get off the bike and snap a dry leafy bough under his boot, the clearing littered with saplings and massive oaks and wiry oxeye daisies, a desultory scatter of poppies growing over the moss as if someone had thrown out seeds from a packet in the spring, or perhaps something was buried here. Poetry spread through his head the way it often did and fluttered its immense, delirious velvet wings down his spine: _I run to death, and death meets me as fast, and all my pleasures are like yesterday_.

“I’m leaving my clothes here. Doesn’t look like anything’s going to chew on them,” said Remus. His voice sounded like something had him by the scruff of the neck. “It’s going to rain.”

“I can smell it,” said Sirius, still with both legs swung over the motorbike, the light gone thunderstorm-green, loam and August smoke and the open, hopeful earth clamoring for the cloud-burst. There was moonlight already in Remus’s eyes and under his skin, all the slender too-long wrung-out strength of him bowed, slouching terribly in the twilight glow of the spell beginning in the marrow, alighting along every rerouted nerve. “I can feel it.”

“Almost,” said Remus, slurring slightly, his eyes glassy, entranced in the swift pulling tide of the magic. It had always looked to Sirius like a cyclical unbirth: ancient, sacrosanct, holiest wound, the irrevocable and transforming butterfly-ripple that had made him—that had made all of them. “Almost time.”

“You’ll be fine here,” said Sirius. One foot on the accelerator. He could tell Remus didn’t want to ask but his head snapped up to Sirius like he’d been slapped.

This was the one deforming constant of their entire lives. Everything else bent and warped and magnetized around this—their friendship, their love, their trust, their deathless souls. This was the truest and most unassailable proof he’d ever had that they were meant to be together, that they had no future without each other, for better or for worse. It was the one choice, running across the wide unfolding palm of the fields at sixteen and holding Remus’s shaking frame together through the drumbeat-dirge of nightfall with his arms and his hands and his mouth in their bed in Camden or the secret forests of the West Country, the one single certain perfect choice that he had never had to make. He would have died for it or killed for it. He would have bargained his heart and his soul away for it; after all he had willingly surrendered those to Remus, so many brittle years ago.

“You’re not coming with me?” asked Remus. His breathing had changed, almost panting, and the thing in Sirius that was the dog or his soul or himself or all three whined and pleaded and begged even as he switched the headlights back on. “Aren’t you—”

“No,” he said. “I’ll pick you up here in the morning.”

Remus stared at him, unbelieving, his mouth split and curved like a knife, head full of hurt, the change already twisting inarticulately up from the root of his spine, changing shape. “You are so pathetic—”

Jamming his foot onto the accelerator Sirius drove off before he could get anything else out and didn’t look back until he was far enough away that he could just see Remus smudged in the last stained-glass gleam of light in the side mirror, his knees drawn up to his chest, watching the motorbike disappear over the hill. A tremor caught him from below and murmured from his toes up to his head all the way back through town and to the henge in the east, where he got off the bike with an almost drugged dizziness and sat down in the center where the magic seeped like honey or like music flowing, hypnotic, lullaby-sweet when he lay down to press his ear to the warm unloosed current of it thinking of energy transfer and the shadowplay of the stones under the guttering moonlight; he wept enormous heaving sobs until his throat gave out and then he wept silently into the senseless embrace of the earth as the thunder rolled in across the lake. Only once before the lightning bolted across the fish-scale underbelly of the clouds and the rain unpeeled from the sky did he see the moon moving directly overhead in its slow sickle arc, circling like a carrion bird. If he’d had any voice left he would have screamed at it. No matter how tight he shut the curtains every night or how many what-ifs he gorged himself on or how shitfaced blackout drunk he got and no matter where or when or how he went it would be always. And somewhere on the other bleary side of it was Remus. It would be always. Wherever Remus was, there was his soul. There was his home. What else even was there?

—

About a year after he left home he started to have a dream about Regulus.

One afternoon there’d be a knock at the door of the dormitory or the flat or an unfamiliar autumn house at the edge of the sea and Sirius would let him in; sometimes he’d be holding bags, sometimes he’d carry only himself and the gold fob watch he’d inherited from their father, dressed in green and black with his hair sodden from the rain, droplets glistening like tears on his seventeen-year-old face. They’d make tea and Regulus would smile his haughty close-mouthed crooked smile, and even when there was no sea Sirius could hear the waves driving underneath the boundless noon-blue sky, the bitter-salt smell of youth and of heartbreak. Mornings he could never remember what they’d talked about. Not family, never forgiveness, which was neither of theirs to bestow.

But somewhere within the decaying wreckage of the last year he’d opened the door to see that Remus’s face had begun mutilate and then transpose Regulus’s, his brother’s skin cracking like an eggshell when he turned his back to reveal someone else underneath: Sirius would find him there as if on accident, never knocking or speaking but only watching through the threshold, a ghost haunting every seething and directionless emptiness, a perpetual voyeur illuminating every draughty hour of all the life he was condemned to live without Remus. Other times he’d find himself wandering to wherever Remus was with a sleepwalker’s elated amnesia, watching him lie in bed with Dearborn or in his old sunglasses walking with quick hunted strides over the curb or seeking him out across the unreasonable chimeric landscape of his dreamspace through deserts and flat open fenland and peat bogs and seashores and the agitated electric overhang of cities he’d never been to. He knew Remus anywhere. A few times they slit their throats together or shot each other in an act of semi-erotic ritual consummation but mostly Sirius just watched him, his face moving through a crowd or his eyes fixed on the mobile watercolor architecture of the landscape flickering across the prismatic horizon, becoming. If he’d been asked Sirius would have denied that these were his favorite dreams: only the abandon of loving someone with no commensurate cost at all.

The sea was freezing even though the sun had been out for a couple of hours at dawn over the curving rocky stretch of shoreline, the bristly-spined stalks of grass rustling in the wind like chimes underscoring the morning sea-song where the waves had battered the creaky dock and the beach in the storm. Very early he heard Remus get up to sit outside, which was where he’d been since Sirius woke up fully after a few hours’ fitful and unquiet sleep in the jittery one-room hut they’d stayed at the night before, Sirius curled sideways in the single armchair and Remus on the twin bed that smelled faintly of seaweed and lemon while the wind whipped seaspray through the gaps in the wooden walls; when he ventured downhill after a brisk and yelping, soul-singing cold shower in the back with wet hair and two coffees in old jadeite mugs Remus hadn’t moved, his forearms locked around his bent knees, the scratchy wool blanket from the bed around his shoulders with the moon’s marionette strings not yet unwound from his stiff snapping joints. Wordlessly he took the mug from Sirius and didn’t look up when he sat down beside him, thinking about the curious symmetry of it, looking at Remus scratch a fresh pink scab under the collar of his loose t-shirt and stare out at the mindless sea like the holy wounded waiting for the fated healing savior or perhaps for oblivion. His dreams never lasted long enough to work out the answer but he knew incontrovertibly that it wasn’t him Remus was waiting for.

Since the full moon three days ago they hadn’t spoken at all. Near dawn Sirius had driven wide awake and shivering back to the hotel and changed out of his drenched clothes after spending the night at the thunderstorm henge and then out to the forest miles outside of town, where he waited for Remus at the sinuous twist of the stream bed with a mounting ear-ringing numbness until an owl (from Dumbledore, always from Dumbledore, if he didn’t know better Sirius might have thought he got a gleeful sadistic kick out of torturing them) brought him a copy of the Sunday _Prophet_ detailing two murders in Halifax the night before complete with lurid full-color photographs of the dark mark over both houses like brutal fireworks; one of the names he recognized as a second cousin of James’s who had been peripherally involved in the initial forging of the Order of the Phoenix. Another move would already be in the works. He thought of Lily tearing her hair out, saying she felt chained to James and the baby and the house. The effort it would take to start screaming seemed like too much, like it would break him, too little of him scraped over too much of everything, so instead he started to cry and laugh almost simultaneously and had only just sobered up when Remus stumbled into the clearing for his clothes looking not too worse for the wear until Sirius handed him the newspaper; they said nothing but in the hotel room all day and all night they occasionally stared each other down across the beds like intruders out of Hades, come at last for each other’s souls.

Monday morning Sirius had said, Let’s go, and they’d packed their scant belongings after a disgusting breakfast of tinned tomatoes on toast and gotten on the motorbike, stopping first at the grocery and then just driving for hours until Sirius parked in front of the remote beach hut on the rocks just as the gales got up again in the foggy midafternoon chill. It was sequestered on a secret beach near the Scottish border and it was the only vaguely habitable thing along the coast for miles and miles; the land and the ancient dagger-carven stones at sea and the hut all belonged to a friend of Dumbledore’s who had given them permission to use it in case of an emergency, which Sirius was not sure this constituted. He also didn’t care. The violation of it all—of the war, of each other—seemed complete: when would there ever be time again? They’d cast _scourgify_ on every dusty surface and Sirius poured water from the pump out back and then lit the woodstove to make grilled cheeses with apple slices while Remus went around lighting the oil lamps as the rain started drumming throttlingly on the roof, the breakers crashing onto the rough runic crown of the rocks and then lapping at the shore like greedy mouths. In lieu of anything else to do that night and not wanting to hear the silence bearing down on the room Sirius boiled water for tea and tuned the ancient wireless on top of the coat rack out of the static, searching at first for music before something snagged on the white-noise crackle-and-hiss that made him work his way backwards until he caught the right station, or close enough.

It was a shortwave transmission that changed frequencies unpredictably and broadcast seemingly at random; the Order had been able to pin down neither the location nor the purpose and though it was generally known to be perused by select among Voldemort’s cadre—the voices were staticky but undisguised—they couldn’t link it to any specific Death Eater activity, much less make sense of the broadcasts. Invariably the transmissions lasted from five to fifteen minutes and consisted of a short, monotonous dialtone-buzz intercut with nonsense: medical terms, lines of obscure German literature, names of dead pureblood duelists, arithmancy equations, coordinates on the moon, nonsense sentences. Priceless gibberish. Lily and Emmeline Vance, who had been analyzing them together over gin and tonics during Lily’s extended house arrest, thought it might be a sort of all-clear to indicate movement; Elphias Doge had suggested they were coded commands meant for surveillance of new recruits as Voldemort grew more paranoid, and indeed the the broadcasts had increased sharply in frequency of late. Any theory was as likely as the next. Sirius turned up the volume with the hair at the back of his neck all standing up and met Remus’s eyes as they’d been doing or as they’d been trying to do since time immemorial. Bound up in each other was the beginning and the end of themselves and of all things.

 _THE FALSE GRAIL REMAINS_ , said the voice, a woman’s, high and wild. Even through the static he knew horribly that it was Bellatrix. All he could think of was Regulus, listening rapt to her voice at Christmases and Easters even as he edged nervously to the doorway wiping his sweaty palms on his knees, compelled and repulsed. _THE FALSE GRAIL MUST REMAIN. THE THIEF SHAMEFACED BLINDED BY THE GLIMPSE OF GOD. THE FALSE GRAIL REMAINS. THE CHALICE RESTS ETERNAL. OUR LORD VICTORIOUS. OUR LORD UNDYING._.

Some part of him had been thinking it since he’d read about the murders in Ormskirk on Saturday and he knew without being told that Remus had been too; they hardly needed to vocalize the knowledge that passed between them without sound or words. Afterwards he would never be certain if Remus actually said _horcrux_ or if they communicated this as so many things telepathically on whatever spiritual frequency range existed between them but it seemed so very obvious in retrospect.

No doubt Dumbledore in all his fucking cryptic eminence already knew by now, if he hadn’t known or suspected before he even sent them up here; they hadn’t even owled him yet. Horcruxes were an obscure branch of dark magic even by the standards of delusional would-be tyrants. They had never covered them in school and most of what Sirius knew about them was limited to assorted terrifying dark texts in the Black family library and a few memorable History of Magic classes in seventh year when he’d actually showed up sober and awake: there had been some kind of rumor flying around at the time, the specifics of which escaped him now except that it had concerned Dumbledore and that Binns had been asked several times about the creation of horcruxes and the various historical figures thought to have made them. Legend had it that all four Hogwarts founders had created one but Binns was quick to point out that this was entirely unfounded and unrecorded in any reliable histories of the period—not even Grindelwald had made one. The stakes were simply too high. And his brother, his idiot brother always so enchanted by such uncontainable power, by the imagined infinitude of his own duty, by the bullshit promise of his own blood, had seen the face of God just as Bellatrix had said and realized that it was royally not what he expected after all.

From the pocket of his jeans he found the joint he’d forgotten he rolled the night before and was about to light it before he caught Remus watching him from the corner of his eye and handed it over to him instead, lighting it with a murmur of his fingers, the flame catching pure burnt bruise-blue at the tip as Remus took a hit. “Chivalry isn’t dead,” he said eventually, exhaling an unreadable spiral of smoke.

“I thought you had a policy about like, actively encouraging me.”

“Yes but that never extended to your drugs or your cooking.”

“Brilliant man,” said Sirius, feeling the callouses of their fingers slide roughly together when Remus passed it back to him, but he was smiling. “Somehow when we were planning on coming up here ourselves I always figured I’d be changed, or something. And I guess I have been. But it’s like—it’s not how I wanted or how I thought. Like this is beautiful but I can’t, sometimes it’s like nothing will ever move me again.” Nothing to lose if he let it all spill out now; after all it was mostly gone anyway. He took another hit before he gave the joint back to Remus. “Do you ever feel like that?”

Remus seemed not to know what he was talking about at first and then his eyes widened, mossy river-green, red mouth just open, remembering. “Give me that,” he said. After another hit and half a minute he said, “Yes. I do. Like I said—like there’s nothing left in me. It’s all been blown out.” He scratched the long bridge of his nose and shifted the blanket around his shoulders like the thought of it brought on a chill which he supposed it did. Sirius took a sip of coffee heavy with cream and no sugar the way they both liked. “Have you still got that map?”

“Yeah.”

“If it were me I’d have burned it. I sold everything you ever gave me.”

“Most things I did burn. I just never got around to torching that one and it’s like, what does it matter now? It’s over.” A seabird called far off, nearly lost against the purging chorus of the waves.

“I’m not sure it’ll ever be over,” said Remus. His mouth twisted with a sudden weather-change. “Are you ever going to tell me where you were the other night?”

Despite the sweet blurry full-body dream-daze of the pot there was a funny wheeling sensation in the pit of his stomach when he thought about the full moon night, which to this point he had not really let himself think about at all; as with all the worst memories it made him want to crawl into some forgotten corner of his own head or the flat or try some crackpot dimension-switch spell with his body as the conduit through space-time and never come back out. “Would you believe me?”

“No,” said Remus. “And you wouldn’t believe me. You don’t believe me.” He closed his eyes and inhaled. “It’ll never be over.”

Sirius noticed that he had ink under his fingernails drying with the old blood and wondered if he’d written Dearborn again but didn’t ask. Dearborn felt like he belonged in another world right now, even his name, insignificant as a sigh, irrelevant. He almost laughed. “I always forget your bouts of fatalism.”

“Something we always had in common.”

“I—yes. You just kept quiet about it most of the time.”

“I made you that mixtape once about, I don’t remember, the chaos theory of it all. How the universe would’ve knocked our heads together one way or another because we were the biggest cosmic inevitability of all. Et cetera.”

A week after Remus moved out Sirius had turned it over in his hands like unearthed treasure and then broken it on the granite edge of the kitchen counter, slicing up his palm. “But you never believed that.”

“I resented it, or eventually I did. I think you do, too.”

“I also loved it. Even if looking back it was like being in love with something that only really existed in my head. There were times I wasn’t sure I didn’t make you up wholecloth.”

He was half-expecting derision or anger but Remus laughed, which caught like a spark to dry grass and spread with a snag of his breath into Sirius. It was the pot, he supposed. “That sounds not dissimilar to how I’ve felt. Even being so preoccupied with someone else, because I was. And I still am. But no matter what it always came screaming back any time something scratched the surface, like did I ever know you, or did we ever really know a true version of each other, and did I ever have a choice in any of it.”

“I thought we did,” said Sirius, “incompletely, maybe. But I knew you. I thought I knew you like my own soul.”

“Jesus. You’ve always been so dramatic.”

“It’s not dramatic if it’s just true, asshole.”

“I’ve always felt like—I’ve told you this. I’m always stuck waiting on you,” said Remus, passing his open palm between them and the sea. “Sometimes I think I always have been. When I tried to stop, any time I’ve ever tried to stop I still feel it. It’s always, where’s Sirius, where did he go, when’s he going to remember he left me somewhere and forgot me. When’s he coming back, because he always comes back.” He took a quivering breath and swallowed. “You have no idea how much I hate it.”

“Sorry,” he said. “For what it’s worth. I am sorry.”

“There’s never been any choice,” Remus repeated.

Lately Sirius had done a lot of thinking about love, about the impossible nautilus trail of it, the fucked unanswerable problem at the atomic nexus of their very souls, the sacred, wounded knot around which everything else inexorably orbited, the indecipherable ur-language that would never be unraveled. Possibly it was the pot making everything seem a bit nearer and a bit clearer than it was but it seemed very obvious when it hit him that as much as it was anything love was a choice—that perhaps it was the only choice. Love was a choice you made; it was a decision made consciously, embraced with both arms, fell into head-first, joy and guilt and pain and fear and pleasure and hopes and dreams and dead devotion and all. Love disassembled you. Love transformed. More than anything else it was a choice that had to be made again and again and again, shapeshifting, rewriting, becoming. Perhaps there was no greater courage than looking at new freckles on someone else’s face, your hair shorter, the pattern of your sleep changing dialects, knowing that you were somewhere and someone else now, that you weren’t sure where you were going, but there would still be apples in the fall and September skies, and you would still put wildflowers on the kitchen table and leave notes under coffee cups and in coat pockets and flung out of windows across the country, and you would still see all of it through together.

What cowards they were. What miserable bloody cowards.

“That is such a bullshit cop-out,” he said instead, making Remus’s head twitch sideways, not quite looking him in the eye. “For years you’ve acted like nothing is ever your choice or what you want—I’m not sure you even _know_ what you want—and thus nothing is ever your fault and you’re just, you’ve always been so unwilling to accept that sometimes your problems are of your own goddamn making. You’d rather run away than ever fix anything. Some of it isn’t up to you and you’ve had a hell of a lot less choice than the rest of us. You’ve had choices. My brother had choices. So did I. You have to learn to live with that. And you’re so blinded by your own suffering sometimes that you can’t even admit there are times when you’ve made your own bed or at least had a hand in it. But you’ve never, you’ve got no shortage of blame to throw around.”

“And you _don’t_?”

“Did you hear anything I just said. Nothing was all you or all me.” Along the shore seaglass caught the grey cloud-light and sparkled like something broken, or maybe just an accident waiting to happen. “I am sorry. For everything I ever did and didn’t and couldn’t. I’ve said that but I don’t think I can ever really, you know, wrap my mouth around it. I’m sorrier than you know and I’m always sorry too late. It eats me up. It’s rewired my entire fucking brain and if you cut me open my arteries would probably be clogged with it. And I’m not sure what that means, or where we go from here, or if there’s anywhere left to go. But I thought you should know.”

Remus sniffed and took a drink of coffee, pressing the heel of his hand into his left eye and nearly elbowing Sirius. For a while neither of them said anything. Just the restless August wind in the trees and their breathing bodies. All around the sea. Then Remus’s face twisted and he said, “The truth is I miss you like hell.” He laughed wetly the way he did on the rare occasions when Sirius had seen him cry, when he was trying to cover it up. “Goddamn you.”

“I miss you, too,” said Sirius. Whether they both meant it for benediction or accusation he couldn’t tell. “I don’t think I’ll ever stop.”

“If you could,” said Remus, “if you could go all the way back, would you do it again? If you got another chance, I mean. Would you still,” but he trailed off and didn’t finish.

So many times he had thought about it—in fact he had done research into highly theoretical magic and time-turners in advanced spellbooks he checked out from the library or bought from the magic shop down the road from the flat, looking for an answer that wasn’t there half in seriousness and half to distract himself from the blank spaces in the flat after Remus had left, knowing full well he couldn’t do any of them without risking permanent spell damage. What wouldn’t he have given, what bargain wouldn’t he have made, what gold, what money, how many years, how much blood, how many pieces of his soul drawn and quartered, what infernal dowry, what tithe, what price would he not pay to do it all over again, a million mistakes unmade, a thousand firsts and lasts erased, chain reactions undone and unsaid and unmade. For months he’d been obsessed with elaborate hypotheticals and acid-trip fantasies; he couldn’t say when he’d finally stopped.

“I used to think, if I could go back even partway, I would give anything,” he said. His eyes were stinging and his voice sounded choked, like it was coming from somewhere out at sea; he hardly even cared that Remus knew he was crying. “Maybe I’d fuck up some of the same things again but I’d have done anything for that chance, just for a piece of it. Now I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know.”

“Fair enough,” said Remus. The way he was looking out at the wide brimming sea made Sirius think of Regulus on the banks of Windermere, yearning for what he could never name.

“I do wish I could start over,” said Sirius. “Not go back but like, just start all over. Forget everything else and start again from the very beginning.”

“You can never really start over,” said Remus. “Not completely.”

“No. I know. And I don’t know if it would ever be enough. I don’t know if anything would ever be.” He took one more hit with the joint pinched between his thumb and forefinger and then put it out in the sand. “Suppose we ought to get going.”

“Where are we going,” asked Remus, though Sirius understood he wasn’t asking him or even himself, and that anyway there was no answer they could give.

“It’s going to storm again.”

“That sounds nice.”

“I can feel it,” said Sirius, standing up with his knees cracking and smiling at the smell of it, balmy-green and scorched like heat lightning, putting his hand out for Remus the way he used to on moon mornings like an affirmation. Here you are and here I am. Here we will always be. “Come on.”

Remus stared at him. Then he took Sirius’s hand.

He was thinking about a story he’d read a few years ago about travelers or maybe settlers, how they would never leave their dead behind for hungry scavengers even when they couldn’t risk carrying dead weight across the desert or through the mountains, which he supposed now was the truest and perhaps the only promise anyone could make: the burial of the beloved as one tender last act of love, this one sacred torturous oath to be carried to the ends of the earth, and in doing so surrendering a piece of yourself forever as testimony to what you have loved. There would be nothing of his brother left to bury but he had always resigned himself to keeping vigil over an empty grave. Long ago he and Remus had promised each other the same desperate thing, in the dark and in their bed and at the kitchen counter and cross-country late at night and at the seashore vibrant as desire, but he had never realized it until now.

Uncertain if this was even happening he led them with an out-of-body shiver back up to the hut where they packed their things while eating the last of the peaches and finishing their coffee, latching the shutters on the only two windows as if they had never been there at all. Blind and stumbling out of the doorway they made their way down the steps into the thickening trees where the earth opened up wet and amazed like a new world, the sky already darkening gunmetal-grey and heavy with thunder through the gaps in the boughs. Beckoning, he realized. Beyond the trees and the sea were all things unsaid and unfinished. He couldn’t imagine what or who they would be when they got there, not with so many miles yet left to go.

It was another loss stacked on the funeral pyre—it wasn’t worth wondering about now when there was no telling what else would be lost and what would be found when the ashes settled, what pieces of them would be exposed, what pieces would be destroyed, what must be buried. Out of the north a wind blew at his back as he got on the motorbike, a compass to whatever fated final rest they sought on this directionless and eternal August pilgrimage. In his throat he could feel his heart clamoring bright as a candle-flame or yearning, diffusing through him like the static pulsebeat-skip of a familiar record, I-am, I-am, I-am, and then at last he looked back to watch Remus slide on the motorbike behind him, his hands at his knees, his palms open to the thunderstorm sky, just out of reach.

—

In the beginning, up the stairs and around the corner:

An unmade bed. Two pumpkin-orange candles burning on the mantel. The windows still open to the burgeoning nighttime city-song, the long straggling stalks in the courtyard below whispering in the unsweet bite of the breeze, the last late blooms fading like glowing embers. An empty takeout box of curry on the kitchen table with two forks, the smell of smoke and mournful loam, the trees showing their blood like bonfires burning reds and golds and yellows in the cowl of the evening mist. On the turntable a scratchy-sweet old blues record from Sirius’s crate full of secondhand treasure from a hundred different thrift shops, on the coffee table two mugs of hot cocoa with chili. October like an omen, like a lover, trembling with expectation and with hunger.

That afternoon he had caught a flash of his brother’s face in the Friday crowd near Leadenhall Market after work, which seemed in these skittish, haunted days as potentious as seeing a Grim. When he blinked it was gone, and as he stood in the street with his bags hanging at his sides and his wand-hand twinging hideously with nervous energy he couldn’t decide whether he’d actually seen him at all and apparated back to the flat in a cold breathless sweat where he chainsmoked until Remus came home from his job at a Muggle pet supply store with a curry and London rainwater in his hair, his hands and his eyes searching when Sirius kissed him in the foyer as if he already knew. After dinner Remus came out of the shower wearing Sirius’s fisherman’s sweater which he had more or less commandeered by now and little else; Sirius made them cocoa and they sat on the couch with it, just listening to the night-hush breathing in the womb of the flat, the familiar shape their bodies made when they were together like a lilting runic incantation only they could read. The breeze caught the curtains and blew Remus into his arms, changing shape again, his fingers in Remus’s hair and spreading honey-slow in the laddered notches of his spine until Remus pressed up against him liquid and unzipped so Sirius could kiss him, their lips and their hips sliding together with a compelling friction as he flicked his tongue between Remus’s lips, feeling his heart stumble and jolt electrically in the birdcage of his ribs where Sirius had pressed one of his hands up his sweater. Pulling away he could see the red scythe moon reflected in the window-glass, in Remus’s eyes, could almost feel it between his own teeth.

He loved seasons like this, Octobers and Augusts and Aprils, halfway things, in-between things, shorelines, blurred borders. Best of all he loved the pure jolting spinal thrill he got when he remembered that this was their first—only the first page. There were so many more unmapped slivers left to be carved out, traveled, uncovered and discovered and redrawn.

“This afternoon when I was walking to the station I saw my brother, or I thought I did,” he said, feeling more than hearing Remus’s hum against his chest. “I haven’t, you know, I still can’t figure out what it would take. If there’s something more I could’ve done. If he’ll ever regret it.” Unsaid: if he’ll ever regret anything like I do, but he knew Remus heard it.

“You can’t save everything,” said Remus, “especially not something that doesn’t want to be. Or even necessarily need to be.”

“It scares me sometimes to think like that. That things are beyond change.”

“Sometimes they are,” said Remus. Against his chest Sirius felt the infinitesimal twitch of his lips as he smiled. “But if I’m being honest that’s like, definitely one of your sexiest qualities. Among many.”

“Oh?”

“I’m not going to _enumerate_ them for you. You’re so in love with your own mystique anyway.”

“Make me a mixtape about it,” said Sirius, laughing with Remus right where their bodies melted and fused together. It felt like skipping stones, or how the earth must feel when the summer rains came down. “Hey. Can I ask you something?”

“No,” said Remus, very sweetly, ear pressed to Sirius’s pulse.

“Are you happy?”

At this Remus lifted his head and looked up at him. “Am I happy?”

“Don’t be an asshole, I can’t do subtlety, I never learned. I could’ve written it on a cake.”

“You could’ve made _me_ a mixtape,” said Remus, who was laughing again. “Have you ever read any Auden?”

“Remus you know I can’t read.”

“Yeah, that note you left me this morning really speaks to your illiteracy. Five paragraphs full of graphic allusions to your insatiable lust. You’re a dog.”

“My prose is ultraviolet,” said Sirius. “But if you’re into that I could start using elaborate euphemisms instead—”

“Oh my God—”

“‘When I get home from toiling all day at work and at long last Excalibur is pulled from its velvet-sheathed steel—’”

“Remember,” laughed Remus, slightly out of breath, “remember when James and Peter had a fit over that group project we did, when I said that there was a massive amount of homoeroticism in virtually all Arthurian everything?”

“If I remember correctly, and I do, that was right around the time you pulled the sword from the stone yourself and embarked on a journey to reclaim your birthright, well-polished steel mast standing at attention—”

“ _Stop_ , Christ.” There had always been in his correct and unhumble opinion something sacred about Remus’s laughter, especially the big belly-deep one Sirius could coax out of him on those occasions when he was unable to stop himself until he was gasping and making himself cry and they both knew his muscles would be sore the next day. It was like witnessing something very beautiful and very rare, like a fawn or a bird of paradise, Sirius only watching the way he often did, holding himself still and quiet for fear of startling him and being deprived of a holy wonder on par with Gilf Kebir or Corbenic itself. “We’re trying to have a serious conversation because you wanted to have one so the least you could do is follow through.”

“Alright. I’ve read ‘The Platonic Blow.’”

“Of course you have,” said Remus. “And you know what, that’s apt too, but there’s this line—about the river jumping over a mountain and the salmon singing in the street. Every time I read it it just, it sort of catches in my throat because that’s how you make me feel. That’s how you’ve always made me feel.”

Hearing it was like being steamrolled in a way he hadn’t expected; when he could find neither his voice nor the words he reached down and stroked his thumb over Remus’s cheekbone before he leaned down to kiss him again, slow and deep, all wonder, all naked reverence. Sirius brushed his thumb over Remus’s bitten-red lower lip and kissed it again, softly. “Lovely man,” he said. “You are. I love you, Moony.”

Remus kissed him again and shivered at the chill in the room, sliding up against Sirius so that their hips slotted together like glass tumblers. “Why do I always give in to you,” said Remus, his head tilted slightly, mystified by Sirius and/or himself and/or the impossible tangle of both of them.

“Same reason I do, probably,” said Sirius. Underneath his palm dragging molten and blood-warm down his ribs to his belly, thumb dipping into the navel, he felt Remus shiver illegibly again but not with the chill, the tremor spreading like a scent or a ghost into Sirius until it worked its way up in a birdwing-flutter from the base of his spine. “Someone’s trying very hard to act like he’s not throwing himself at me,” he said, smiling brightly.

“After last night I think I might break something, I could barely walk this morning.” Remus stretched and then stopped midway through. “Please don’t think I’m complaining.”

“Christ Jesus. I guess we could stretch first.”

Laughter, burning high and echoing like an instrument off the walls, through their skin. “Your sexual whims are good for my thighs and my back so I’m alright with that.”

“Good practice for when we’re like seventy,” said Sirius, wonderingly, and then bent his neck against the autumn wind through the open windows to kiss Remus where he was smiling, right at the quiet thorn-twist of his mouth.

There were no words for this—there had never been any words for this. If anyone asked him to describe Remus, what Remus looked like or how he made Sirius feel or the balm of their shoulders pressed close or the sight of him lying in bed beside him with his rat’s-nest hair every morning when Sirius woke up he couldn’t have done it. Loving him was like magic or music or a slant of sunlight on the wooden floor on a blue morning in August. Remus was in his blood and in his soul, invincible as a morning glory or stubborn mint growing in the shade of a garden, like language, like dreaming. He made Sirius look into cracks and corners and he made him see and hear on soaring and ecstatic new wavelengths and perhaps most criminally Remus made him think there was poetry in himself. Knowing him was like driving far into the country on gravelly backroads where there was nothing but pitch-perfect dark and then looking up to see the holy head-rush of stars like an open vein tearing across the sky. Hoarfrost on the winter windows melting in the firelight, the first of September at King’s Cross, the moon in bloom, October fires. Incommunicable and unutterable, a compass pointing north and north and north. Remus was like all the lights coming on at once in a tiny clustered town at night, the flip of the switch, the hot electrical surge through the wires, the sudden miraculous advent. He wanted everyone to see it but above and before all else he wanted to show Remus—he wanted to drive him all the way out to some forgotten pinprick of a town and wait until the sun delved below the horizon as the stars opened up in the wide wheeling sky and the lights in the houses all came on in the dark one by one by one by one, the sudden sonic thunder-burst jangling up their nerves in symphonic speechlessness until Sirius leaned into him to whisper, That’s it, Moony, this is it, this is how you make me feel. Open your eyes. Look. See what you do to me. 

Someday, he was thinking, someday, someday, whether he lived to be a hundred or he died at twenty-nine Sirius would tell him. He would show him. Death could not hold him and distance could not keep him; if he had to he would walk barefoot across the desert or broken glass or swim the length of the ocean, come back even as a ghost, even as a dream, and he would find Remus, and he would lead him into the swallowing velvet night, and he would tell him so, again and again and again.


End file.
